In yet another display of the tremendous financial faith investors are putting into Indian ed-tech companies, multi-lingual online learning platform Doubtnut has secured $15 million in a new funding round led by Chinese giant Tencent. The startup also witnessed participation from existing investors Omidyar Network India, Akatsuki Entertainment Fund and Curefit founder Ankit Nagori along with Sequoia Capital India.
The company will now use this newly infused capital to expand its distribution as it aims to reach more users through multilingual approach. It will also spend money on building a bigger content library to help reach its user retention goal.
Doubtnut is a multi-lingual digital solutions platform for students of K12, as well as those preparing for India’s famously tough entrance examinations. The platform leverages AI and ML for image recognition, natural language processing and proprietary machine learning algorithms, offering video-based solutions in response to students’ queries.
Further, the firm has said that it will also invest money to strengthen its technology stack and to scale its team. This new investment comes about a year after the company raised its pre-Series A round from Sequoia’s Surge, Waterbridge Ventures, Omidyar Network India and AET Fund.
Aditya Shankar, Co-Founder, Doubtnut, said: “Tencent will add immense value to our journey. Their experience of working with Yuanfudao in China will help our team get fresh and valuable perspective on distribution first edtech models.”
Doubtnut was founded in 2017 by Tanushree Nagori and Aditya Shankar and the company now claims to have more than 13 million monthly active users across several platforms, including web, app, YouTube and WhatsApp.
Going multi-lingual could prove a boon for doubtnut. India is a diverse country with the the constitution itself recognizing 22 official languages. Add do that the multiple dialects each of these languages possess and you would feel as if you are changing countries while touring the Indian subcontinent. Additionally, there has been an ever increasing demand for content that comes in native languages and not just English.
Doubtnut claims to have witnessed a 30x growth in its daily active users since March 2019.
This investment from Tencent in Doubtnut is the company’s second funding in this space, after investing in Byju’s, which is now valued at over $8 billion after its most recent funding of $200 million from Tiger Global Management.
