Vedantu invests $2 mn in doubt solving startup Instasolv for full rights to acquisition

Vedantu Innovations, which operates an eponymous live online tutoring platform, said on Tuesday it has invested $2 million in a seed round of funding, dubbed as ‘pre-series A,’ in edtech startup Adinio Services, which runs doubt-solving app Instasolv.

The investment is in exchange for full rights to acquisition, which in this context translates to reserving the right to acquire Adinio Services, for a limited period of time extending until July, Adinio co-founder Aditya Singhal told TechCircle.

Singhal declined to comment on the nature of the partnership. The investment, he said, was raised in December 2019. The Noida based company was founded in January 2019, and launched Instasolv in June 2019.

The funds raised will be used to expand the catalogue of content, subjects and languages and build more technology at Instasolv, Singhal told TechCircle.

“We are launching live classes at a very attractive price point of only Rs 800 ($10.60) per month, which no one else has done till now. It is basically the Jio equivalent to education. What Jio did to telecom, we are doing to education,” Singhal said.

Adinio Services was founded in 2019 by IIT Delhi alumni Singhal, Nishant Sinha, and SRM University alumnus Bahul Arora. 

Singhal and Sinha also co-founded Transweb Educational Services, the parent company to two edtech platforms askIITians and Transtutors.

Instasolv claims to receive 3 million questions on its app monthly and solves doubts instantly for free. A student clicks a photo of a question for the platform to use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract text. The platform further uses artificial intelligence algorithms to match with a question database to provide an answer.

"Our investment in Instasolv is a strategic step to strengthen our play in doubt-solving, which is one of the key aspects of learning online. We are excited to partner Instasolv and leverage the category as more students join this new learning wave in Tier 3 and Tier 4 markets," Vamsi Krishna, CEO and co-founder at Vedantu said.

Eleven-year-old Vedantu’s first edtech bet is expected to help it strengthen its focus in the doubt-solving space, where queries are solved by teachers in a chat format, the statement said.

The deal also marks Vedantu's growing interest into tier-3 and tier-4 towns, the statement added.

“Vedantu has solved over 1 million doubts for its students. The learning and teaching methods are changing drastically during the Covid-19 period and Vedantu has seen a massive increase during this outbreak as students continue learning from the safe confines of their homes,” the statement further said.

The Tiger Global backed Bengaluru based startup is in the midst of raising funds in a Series C round of funding, with the disclosure of the latest tranche of $6.8 million made in April.

Vedantu has raised about $96 million in funding so far, according to VCCEdge data.