Sigrid Education, an online learning platform has received undisclosed investment from Oliphans Capital, an early stage investment firm. The financial details of the deal are not revealed but the investment firm typically invests in the range of $0.5 million to $3 million. We have mailed both Sigrid and Oliphans for a confirmed figure, and will get back as soon as we hear.
This investment marks the eighth investment from Oliphans Capital into early-stage start-ups. With the latest capital infusion, Sigrid now aims to create and introduce courses in the 50 most prominent test-prep and K12 curriculum areas over the next 6 months.
Founded by Ajit Maheswari, Atul Kasaundhan and Aakash Aggarwal, Sigrid Education partners with educational institutes and teachers to bring their teaching methods, concept and expertise beyond classrooms. It’s service is available over Web, Android, iOS and Windows.
It enables teachers to bring their courseware, testing material and insights online, and thus allowing them to reach out to students across the country. This eventually benefits students from the ability of the great teachers. You can compare this, to SuperProfs, the online learning platform which connects professors with students by delivery live lectures from the former, to the latter.
Content on Sigrid’s website is co-created with institutes which are using Sigrid Notes, which the startup claims a patent pending technology. The company claims that its content is ideal for revision and doubt clearing and gives learners a classroom like experience.
Sigrid Notes is claimed to be designed with compatibility of all operating systems and browsers. It is has an extremely low internet footprint, using as much as 95% less internet data. You also get presented with a comprehensive dashboard and complete peer-to-peer analysis.
The Noida-based company already has presence in 36 cities across 8 states in India. It claims to have about 347 schools registered with over 60,000 students on its platform.
Ajit Maheswari, Sigrid Education’s CEO and co-founder, said,
We feel Students are now looking for customised information and learning experience rather than a mass approach available at schools and colleges. Our platform aims to get the best out of students by providing them high quality content with the option to personalize the pace and time.
Anish Jhaveri, Founder of Oliphans Capital, said,
The Sigrid team, with their valuable experience in the offline and on-line education delivery sectors, understands the Indian education system well and is able to bring the content based on their analysis of the loopholes in the education system. We are sure the platform will be a great value add to the students in the years to come.
Digital education, or online content is still in its nascent stages in India. However,we have seen multitude of startups coming up in this field, with an aim to uniformise education across India. Sigrid Education will compete with the likes of Toppr, which recently raised $10 million in Series B round of funding from Fiedility, SAIF and Helion.
Live online tutoring platform Vedantu also secured $5 million in Series A round from Accel and Tiger Global. Earlier this week, EduKart raised $1 million from YouWeCan Ventures, 500 Startups and Holostik Group’s United Finsec. And as mentioned before, SuperProfs, probably the most similar looking model to Sigrid, has also raised a $1.8 Million round. It recently launched a mobile app as well.
The way people consume information has changed drastically in the past few years and the change can be seen in the education sector as well. However, with increasing emphasis on quality of content by students and also ease of availability, we expect it to be the next big thing.
