Lately, ed-tech firms have been raising significant amount of funds and joining the list is Hyderabad-based Byndr – a mobile based learning platform. It has raised $700,000 in its seed funding round.
The funding in the current round comes from Education Design Studio, an ed-tech accelerator at the University of Pennsylvania, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and a group of angel investors. It is also incubated at Education Design Studio.
The funds will be used to further grow its product scope by providing more access to educational content for students and more administrative features for colleges. The company will also be able to accelerate its expansion.
Joseph Freed, co-founder and CEO of Byndr, said,
This round of funding will allow us to accelerate expansion and continue providing easy-to-use and mobile-first products for all stakeholders in higher education.
In 2017, it is projected that 80% of the internet users in India will be mobile. So the only way to truly create a single point of access for students in mobile-dependent markets like India is with a mobile-first product.
Byndr was launched in March 2015 by five co-founders. Among those five, three are Indians and two are Americans. The startup’s key objective is to connect colleges and teachers with students. It functions as an administrative suite, allowing colleges to share and manage assignments, mark attendance, grade students, design a timetable to keep track of assignments and exams, upload content and share course activity in a feed.
The company’s customers are, however, all Indian and the products are being sold only in India for the time-being. While the company’s founder said that the money raised will be used to expand its business to other countries, he has not named any particular ones.
Its Android application is currently being used by more than 50 Indian colleges, such as Osmania University College of Engineering and Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology. It claims to have a total installed base of over 50,000 students on its platform.
Bobbi Kurshan, chairman of Education Design Studio, said,
Byndr is changing the LMS model. It is creating a solution for emerging economies with lack of persistent internet, lower cost points and need for a light-weight solution.
The new funding will be used to support and continue to grow the excellent team and to help expand the impact of this unique mobile solution across India and other emerging edtech ecosystems.
Byndr is in direct competition with Byju’s, who is also eyeing international expansion in the near future. Byju’s is also planning to raise another hefty $50 million investment following the $75 million it raised in March from Sequoia Capital & Sofina. It is already pretty established in India and the Middle-East. Other e-learning platforms that can also become a hindrance in Byndr’s growth could be EduAce and Oliveboard.
