With $80 mn in growth round, homework helper Brainly eyes India edtech market

Polish edtech company Brainly, which helps students with homework, aims to expand its presence in the Indian market armed with $80 million (Rs 588.30 crore at current exchange rates) that it recently raised in a growth round. 

The investment, according to a statement from the company, was led by venture capital firm Learn Capital, with participation from Prosus Ventures, General Catalyst Partners as well as existing investors Runa Capital and MantaRay. The current funding, Series D, takes the total amount raised by the company to $150 million.

Brainly says it plans to deploy the new capital to launch products for students and parents in India -- from where it sees more than 55 million active users every month. It also plans to augment its business footprint across two other high-growth markets -- Brazil and Indonesia. 

Read: Naspers-backed Brainly appoints Rajesh Bysani as chief product officer

Founded in 2009 by Michał Borkowski, Lukasz Haluch, Tomasz Kraus, the startup claims to be one of the largest peer-to-peer community learning platforms in the world. 

The platform has learning communities based out of Russia, US, and Latin America. Globally, it has 350 million unique users from more than 35 countries every month. The user-base has grown by more than 75% since April 2020, the statement added.

Brainly lets high school and middle school students connect with peers studying in the same classes or their parents and teachers to post or resolve queries in core academic subjects such as Mathematics, Science, Social Studies or languages like Hindi, English and others. 

Parents can use the community to address queries while teaching their children.

“The growth of this model has accelerated as a result of the global pandemic, forever changing the way students learn, While Brainly has demonstrated a high rate of growth for years, over the past six months, we have achieved growth milestones that we had projected to hit over the next few years. We receive immensely positive feedback from students, parents, and teachers using Brainly, so there are no signs of this growth slowing down anytime soon, ” Borkowski said in the statement.

The Covid-19 pandemic has helped edtech firms attract investor interest. So far in 2020, Indian edtech startups have cumulatively raised $2.2 billion, which is more than what was raised ($1.8 billion) from 2016 to 2019. Among these, Byju’s and Unacademy have raised the most capital, $2.32 billion and $354 million, respectively, followed by Vedantu, Toppr, and Lead School.