Start-ups like Byju’s and Unacademy have led to the unprecedented growth of the edtech sector in India, spurred by the shift to online education during the pandemic. Other firms have started taking a page out of their books, as is evident in the recent cases of upGrad, ClassPlus, and Eruditus, which became the 4th Indian edtech unicorn. Today, edtech start-up Yellow Class has joined the club after raising $6 million in its Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital.
Coming after the $1.5 million the start-up had raised as seed funding last November, the current funding round also included participation from angel investors like Meesho cofounder Vidit Aatrey, Indifi founder Alok Mittal, Bounce co-founder Vivekananda Hallakere, OYO COO Abhinav Sinha, OYO Global CSO Maninder Gulati, Xiaomi Indonesia Country Director Alvin Tse and PropTiger CEO Dhruv Agarwala, and existing investors India Quotient, Titan Capital and First Cheque.
According to Yellow Class, the proceeds from the funding round will be utilized to improve its product and develop more holistic content, create brand awareness and hire people for leadership roles across the product, technology, and engineering verticals, as well as expand in over 500 cities in the country and in the international markets.
These are ambitious plans, no doubt, on the part of the one-year-old start-up, which is known to provide extracurricular and co-curricular classes to children between 3-12 years, across over 40 categories like art, craft, dance, yoga, general knowledge, logical reasoning, and others. The children are taught by professionals, influencers, and others. Founded by Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal, the start-up already has over a million children engaged for over 150 minutes on its platform and claims that each of its classes (equipped with an interactive chatbot) are attended by as many as 10,000 children simultaneously.
For now, the start-up aims to serve 10 million monthly active users on its platform within a year and experiment with adding new categories such as musical instruments and sports. “In the last 10 years, there has been an exponential rise in the time spent by children passively consuming online content—which is extremely harmful to their growth. Studies have shown that more than 100 million Indian kids below 13 years of age spend an average of 100 hours per month on YouTube and other similar platforms. We are actively looking for top talent who can lead the growth of Yellow Class to serve this large market,” Gupta and Mittal said in a statement.
These numbers may sound surprising, but the never-seen-before expansion of the edtech sector is enough to silence critics. With the pandemic forcing schools and colleges to shut down (and remain closed for more than a year), students and teachers have no choice but to go online to study and teach respectively. The growth of extracurricular learning has been one of the fastest-growing areas (in fact, it is expected to reach $5.8 billion this year) of the edtech sector, and this has been to the benefit of start-ups like Yellow Class, which claims to have grown by 18 times over the last six months.
