Backed by the huge bloom in the edtech sector owing to the pandemic, the Amazon of online education-Classplus, is all set to rake in funds worth $30 million, in a financial round led by global investment giant Tiger Global, according to a report by TechCrunch. If successful, the round will value the startup at roughly $250 million.
Classplus, which was launched back in 2018 ago by Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal, has been working towards the aim of empowering educators to become the best they can be, while also expanding their businesses to keep up with the ever-growing competition.
How does it do that? Well, the platform provides teachers with a full arsenal of online tools and resources, allowing them to bring in their educational content for on-the-phone usage.
The service has often been touted to be similar to Shopify, where businesses can make use of the features provided by the owners of the platform to sell their products online. On Classplus, educators (be it a single teacher, or a whole team of educators from a coaching center) can have their students pay fees online, while delivering them with video lectures and soft copies of study materials. In short, with Classplus, educators can build their coaching center online, instead of having to spring huge sums of money for setting up a dedicated learning environment.
This setup helps both parties, as students can search for the best-in-class content and get enrolled with those providing them, while teachers can expand their reach to multiple cities and other parts of the country.
The Noida-based software firm has seen quite a few investments in recent times, especially post the pandemic, as educational institutions remain closed and students, parents and educational experts flock towards online resources to keep the world of education going. The company has yet to close another investment worth nearly $30 million, from funding agency GSV.
Over a year ago, Classplus had raised $9 million in a round led by RTP Global. Following that, last September saw another sum of $10.3 million coming in, courtesy to investments made by AWI (that’s backed by Falcon Edge) and cricketer Sourav Ganguly. Blume Ventures is another well-known backer.
E-learning platforms have been growing slowly but steadily over the past few years, but the advent of the COVID pandemic has resulted in a growth that was not only unprecedented, but also inevitable. As remote learning became the norm, many e-learning services recorded a significant boom in their user base, as well as a noteworthy increase in funding.
Classplus has been just one of the many beneficiaries of the remote learning age. The edtech sector had risen to record a total investment of $2.22 billion by the end of 2020 (which is up by a landslide from the value in 2019, which was some $533 million), and the growth is by no means stopping any time soon.
Firms like Toppr and Unacademy have noted a major rise in the number of users, which can easily be noted by the sheer number of doubts that Tutors on Toppr solve per minute across the platform, or the amount of effort Unacademy has put in to make the experience better for users.
While the situation in many parts of the world improves, and as many countries start considering a slow return to the offline mode, India is currently walking on eggshells. With the second wave of the pandemic having hit many states pretty bad (and only now seeming to be coming back under control), and with the apparent third wave looming over, the safety of children and youngsters is the primary concern. And so, it seems that educational institutions won’t be opening any time soon, and the edtech industry is here to stay, and grow.
