Doubtnut and SplashLearn
Good morning, its Thursday and Anmol here back with the update. Who would've thought that EdTech would continue to stay the hottest sector as we kick off 2021, but we have two reasonably large deals being announced recently.
http://bit.ly/3qb3oZQ: Doubtnut raises $25M in a Series B
➡️ The Sequoia Surge EdTech company Doubtnut has raised a $25M Series B from SIG Global, Sequoia Capital, WaterBridge Ventures and ON Mauritius. This comes a year after the company's Series A led by Tencent, and the latest round values the company at around $122M
➡️ Doubtnut was in the news a bunch last year in a proposed acquisition by BYJUs, while they were also acquiring WhiteHat Jr. That deal was initially reported at $130M but according to Entrackr's sources- the final deal was made around $80-$90M and thus did not go through.
➡️ While the failed acquisition might have hurt the company's optics in the short-term, it still seems to be an important and growing EdTech player. The company's core product around revolves around students taking pictures of questions they cannot solve and offers recorded video walkthroughs on how to solve similar problems.
➡️ The product is largely aimed at the 6th-12th segment with help on the NCERT syllabus along with a couple of college competitive exams (NEET, JEE), and looks like the company has a couple of live video classes for certain segments as well.
➡️ The company definitely still seems to be the growth phase since they don't seem to be charging students just yet, but I'd be interested to see if Doubtnut builds a massive business as an independent company or is acquired and becomes a feature in one of the larger edtech companies.
http://bit.ly/3rEVybe: SplashLearn raises a $18M Series C from Owl Ventures & Accel
➡️ In more edtech news, Game-based learning company SplashLearn has raised a $18M Series C from Owl Ventures (also invested in both BYJUs and WhiteHat Jr) and existing investor Accel. Unlike some of the other EdTech companies in the news recently, SplashLearn is actually quite old and was founded in 2010.
➡️ The company teaches math (K-5) and reading (K-2) to children in a format that's more engaging to children and adaptable to each child's individual learning pace. The product is currently being used by over 40M children in over 150 countries, and the team of 230 plans to double in size this year.
➡️ Just like most other companies in a similar segment, the company'a adoption surged during the pandemic- growing 3x while addding 10M students. The company also actually has a much larger global than local presence with 30% of its users coming from the US, followed by the UK and Australia (India is 5th).
➡️ The company now plans to use the capital to scale up its tutoring vertical, which launched recently (I assume this could be a maojr revenue driver) along with continuing to invest in research and development. I personally think it's incredible how many global EdTech companies are emerging out of India.
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