Edtech startup Newton School secures Series A cheques from RTP Global, HNIs

Education technology startup Newton School has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Russian venture capital firm RTP Global, also an investor in Indian startups such as Cred and Rebel Foods.

Nexus Venture Partners and Prophetic Ventures were returning investors in the round.

A clutch of angel investors including Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamoorthy, CRED founder Kunal Shah, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham and Udaan founder Sujeet Kumar also participated in the round.

Incanus Technologies Pvt. Ltd, the company that owns and operates Newton School, will utilise the capital to expand its team and develop products based on artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline and personalise the learning journey of each student.

Newton School claims to enable people to become highly skilled software developers and pursue careers in the technology sector. Its six-month long cohort based course includes over 1000 hours of coding, over 50 hours of soft skills training, live projects, and mentorship oversight.

Incanus was founded by Nishant Chandra and Siddharth Maheshwari in 2019. In April 2019, VCCircle reported that the company had raised Rs 3 crore from Nexus, Unacademy founders Gaurav Munjal and Hemesh Singh, and K Ganesh for Bolo, a mobile app that offered native-language social and content platform.

In September last year, VCCircle reported that Incanus pivoted from video content platform Bolo to ed-tech business Newton School.

“On one side you have a million+ college graduates every year with low single digit employability rate and on the other side there are 1000s of companies struggling to find talent. We aim to bridge this massive gap through Newton School’s personalized learning platform,” said Chandra.

Newton School has a unique fee model where students are required to pay zero fees upfront and only start paying once they get a job. The platform claims that its students are being hired by more than 100 companies ranging from top startups such as Zomato, Unacademy, Nykaa, Affle to large multinationals such as Publicis Sapient, Thoughtworks, Motorola and Nutanix.

“Engineering education spend in India alone is $10 billion but the net outcome is low employability rates. Newton School is in a prime position to not just tap into this huge market but also to create a massive impact on the lives of millions of students,” said  Kirill Kozhevnikov, partner at RTP Global.

The investment in the company is also indicative of the continued focus on ed-tech startups, with early-stage deals in the space taking place at a rapid clip even as larger startups such as Unacademy and Byju’s are making acquisitions to boost their product portfolio and market share.

Unacademy, which joined the unicorn club of startups valued at $1 billion or more last year, last month announced that its existing investors purchased shares worth $50 million (Rs 366 crore).

BeyondSkool, a live online upskilling academy for kids, raised $2 million in seed funding from early-stage investment fund Tomorrow Capital in January this year.

Also last month, Kyt Technologies Pvt Ltd, which operates a platform focused on extracurricular learning for children, raised $5 million led by Alpha Wave Incubation.