Venture Catalysts leads seed funding round in ed-tech startup Qin1

Noida headquartered edtech platform Qin1 has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed funding round led by incubator Venture Catalysts.

Other participants in the round include Ankit Bhat, co-founder of Ola; Sundeep Sahni, chief compliance officer at Rocket Internet; Mitesh Shah, chief financial officer at BookMyShow and investor at Venture Catalysts; and Chandigarh-based seed fund provider JCurve Series 2, according to a statement.

“This investment will help us expand our personalised live class offering to millions of children in India,” Ishan Gupta, co-founder of Qin1, said.

An Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi graduate, he set up the company with Delhi Technological University alumna Aarti Gupta. 

The platform, which focuses on children between the ages of five and 14, provides personalised live classes across subjects such as spoken English, coding and robotics, along with extra-curricular activities.

“Qin1 creates a customised learning experience for each student – in terms of teacher selection, course design and medium of delivery. While edtech penetration has grown significantly in recent years, focus on kids in primary and pre-primary schools is missing. This presents an untapped opportunity for Qin1,” co-founder (Ishan) Gupta said.

Research and strategy consulting firm SKS advisors helped the company close this transaction, the statement added. 

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Venture Catalysts, which claims to be India’s first integrated incubator, was set up in 2016 by Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Anil Jain, Anuj Golecha and Gaurav Jain. It invests between $250,0000 and $1.5 million in early-stage startups. The company’s portfolio includes fashion etailer Fynd, grooming products startup Beardo, health and wellness brand PeeSafe and co-working space provider Innov8.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has enabled new opportunities for the edtech market in India. Besides formal education, the extracurricular segment (worth $10 billion) is also projected to experience a meteoric rise in the number of users, buoyed by the offline to online shift,” Gaurav Jain, co-founder of Venture Catalysts, said.

There has been some activity in the edtech space this month.

Mumbai-based UpGrad Education, which owns an eponymous edtech platform, was in the process of acquiring at least two to three startups offering online learning, especially in the higher education space. 

Online learning platform Embibe sought to raise a total of $65.92 million from promoter Reliance Industries (RIL). Of that, the startup has already raised $3.96 million (around Rs 30 crore) from the Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate.

Gurugram headquartered K 12 Innovations, which owns online technology learning platform Camp K12, bagged $4 million in a seed funding round from San Francisco-based venture capital firm Matrix Partners India and multi-stage investor SAIF Partners.

Last month, Konselect Educare, a Delhi-based company that operates an examination preparatory portal for engineering graduates called Kreatryx, was acquired by Unacademy in a cash and stock deal. 

Around the same time, online classroom platform Lido Learning, run by Quality Tutorials, raised $3 million from Madhur Deora, president of digital payments firm Paytm, and Picus Capital, a German venture capital fund launched by Rocket Internet co-founder Alexander Samwer.