On Thursday India’s rapidly growing unicorn club added another member after edtech startup Lead School announced that it has raised $100 Mn in Series E round. WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures spearheaded the round. This is their largest edtech investment, according to the statement issued by the VC firms.    

Lead School is the 6^th edtech startup to join the coveted unicorn club. It is also the third unicorn of 2022, after Mamaearth and Fractal joined the club earlier this month. This is the 6^th institutional round for the Mumbai based startup since 2017.

The company will use the proceedings to further its ambition of providing affordable quality education to more than 25 Mn students at an annual run rate of $1 Bn. Simultaneously, it will use the funds to improve its products, curriculum innovation, expanding its footprints and ramping up hiring across the functions.    

Lead School was founded by husband-wife duo Summet Yashpal Mehta and Smita Deorah (see the image) in 2012. The duo started the startup with the aim of reforming and developing India’s primary schools, which is by far the most neglected part of India’s educational system.

Most edtech majors like Byju’s and Vedantu focus on improving the academic performance of K12 students. But Lead School has taken a different route by attempting to reform the very foundation of the educational system, the schools.

Lead School claims that its partner schools are able to provide affordable quality education by giving exposure to students to modern infrastructure, highly trained teachers, deeply researched and highly innovative curriculum.

“If India has to achieve its true potential, its school has to significantly transform so that every child can achieve their true potential. But in K-12, everyone has been talking about edtech that is direct-to-students by circumventing schools. And Every one focuses on test prep and tuitions. Because people have accepted that schools cannot be improved. But we thought differently. A child spends six hours in schools and one hour in tuition. If we can transform schools, imagine what is possible? That’s why we focused on school edtech,”  Smita Deorah said.         

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E-learning platform Dhurina, which is dedicated in helping students to prepare for competitive exams, has concluded its second round of funding. The company has raised total $1.2 Mn led by RCVF and other investors including LetsVenture, RBD Publication, India Accelerator, Precision Startup Advisory, and Pai Ventures. In the previous round, it raised $ 135000 funding from prominent investors like Chandigarh Angels Network and Modulor Capital.

Following the latest round, its total fund-raising amount has now reached to $1.3 Mn. In all likelihood, both these funding rounds were part of the seed funding round. The Gurugram based company has made lofty claims about its download and revenue numbers. The startup has claimed that within 2 years of its inception it has achieved the milestone of 2.5 million downloads and aiming to achieve 10 Mn USD revenue by FY-23. However, Techpluto could not ascertain these numbers independently.

The two-year-old startup offers more than 350 courses for 100+ state-level competitive exam categories. It provides Live Classes, recorded lectures, PDF notes, Test Series, Doubt sessions and short videos for instant revision.

Competitive exam space is one of the highly competitive space, with Softbank and Tiger Global backed Unacademy being one of the biggest players in this space.                

Commenting on this fund raising, Sachin Sardana, Co-Founder and COO, Dhurina said, “The recently concluded round of funding will allow us to leverage the opportunity to expand to other big states of the country and deliver quality education to students at nominal prices. We intend to cater to the exponentially growing market of E-learners in India, who need a platform to prepare for their dream jobs. With these funds, we will now consolidate our position and spread to other big states of the country. Apart from expanding the company’s market at PAN-India level, we also plan to invest the funds in employee’s growth, scaling platform infrastructure and enhancing the product’s features.”

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Ronnie Screwvala promoted edtech firm upGrad has successfully graduated to the unicorn category with a new fundraise of $185 Mn. Existing investor Temasek and two new investors International Finance Cooperation and IIF participated in the new round. The latest round, by the way, has propelled the Mumbai based startup to the coveted unicorn category. The company now commands a valuation of nearly $1.2 Bn.    

UpGrad’s unicorn funding round comes barely two months after the Mumbai based startup had raised $120 Mn. The recently concluded $120 Mn funding round actually marked the company’s maiden fund raise from external investors.

Following the latest round, Screwvala’s company has now amassed $305 Mn from external investors. However, despite two large back-to-back funding rounds, UpGrad is still in discussion to raise another $400 Mn at an eye-popping valuation of $4 Bn. This is according to the press release shared by the company. If UpGrad does clock a $ 4Bn valuation soon then its valuation will surpass that of Unacademy.   

There is still ambiguity over whether these two back-to-back funding rounds had a secondary component or not. A secondary component would obviously pave way for partial offloading of Screwvala’s stake in the company. To the best of Techpluto’s knowledge, Screwvala currently owns a 70% stake in the company.

What sets upGrad apart from its competitors like Unacademy is that it largely offers upscaling courses. The platform essentially offers courses that help working professionals and students in upscaling their skill-sets and eventually help them in creating a flourishing career. It offers over 100 courses in AI, machine learning, data science, blockchain, MBA, finance so and so forth. The platform has tied with several national and international universities to offer these courses.

Interestingly, upGrad will see some competition coming from deeply pocketed players like Byju’s and Unacademy. While Byju’s has already made a entry in the upscaling space by acquiring Great Learning, Unacademy is planning to enter in this space.    

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Founded in 2020,  LearnVern is an online education platform that teaches students professional courses in their own native languages. The Ahmedabad headquartered company has been formed around the philosophy that students easily decipher the most difficult concepts when they learn them in their own native languages.

The platform currently teaches 37 job-oriented courses, ranging from software development, IT, mechanical engineering, civil engineering and digital marketing. It claims that till date nearly 37 lakh students have registered on its platform.

Commenting about the funding, LearnVern’s co-founder & CEO said “At LearnVern we’re excited about the funding – it comes at a time when we are looking to scale and reach out to over four crore students studying in colleges in India. India’s newly launched educational policy 2020 talks about vocational educational and vernacular as the two most transformative changes, which we had envisioned as the requirement of India’s students and launched our solution to meet that need.”

The one-year-old startup has also tied with premium institutes like AITCE and NSDC Skill India Training partner to offer quality vocational courses to students that helps them in increasing their employability.

Today there are many edtech platforms that provide job oriented professional courses. But there are not many platforms that offer courses in vernacular languages. In that sense, the Ahmedabad based startup is catering to a market that is still largely unexplored and probably has immense potential to grow in tier 2 & tier 3 towns of India, touted as Bharat.

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