CoLearn secures $10 mn Series A from Alpha Wave Incubation, GSV Ventures

Indonesian edtech startup CoLearn has secured $10 million (Rs 75 crore) in a Series A funding round co-led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) and San Francisco based edtech investor, GSV Ventures.  

Existing investors, including Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and AC Ventures, also participated in the round, a statement said. 

The company will invest the fresh funds in product, technology, development, hiring, and marketing. 

CoLearn has also built a technology team in India and is actively looking to double the team size by year-end with a focus on recruiting for data science, product, and engineering roles across India, Indonesia, and UAE. 

Jakarta headquartered CoLearn was one of the seven startups selected by Sequoia Surge in April 2020 for their third cohort.  

The startup was launched in January 2020 by Abhay Saboo, Marc Irawan and Sandeep Devaram. It’s an online platform which claims to have rapidly scaled to reach 3.5 million students. The edtech startup allows tuition centres and tutors to create online learning experiences for students.

“Despite having the world’s fourth largest education ecosystem with 50 million students, three million teachers and half a million schools, the quality of education in Indonesia has remained much below its real potential for several decades. The scope for motivating students and ensuring they can thrive in a globalised world is what really drives us all at CoLearn,” Abhay Saboo, co-founder and CEO of CoLearn said. 

For AWI and GSV Ventures, CoLearn marks the beginning of their investment in Indonesia and what is expected to be a long-term bet on emerging opportunities in the fourth most populous country in the world.  

AWI is a $300 million venture fund backed by DisruptAD and managed by Falcon Edge Capital, a $5 billion investment fund with public and private market investments across the world.  

“GSV is thrilled to be backing CoLearn’s compelling co-founders as they look to bring high quality instruction at scale to Indonesia‘s youth. The opportunity to build efficacious learning solutions for the 4th largest country in the world is vast. The greatest businesses are created when entrepreneurs tackle large, important problems and CoLearn is doing just that,” Deborah Quazzo, managing partner at GSV Ventures said. 

Other edtech startups that have recently raised funding include decacorn Byju’s,  augmented reality (AR) based toy maker PlayShifu and Masai School.