Edutech platform Vedantu has announced $100 million of funding in Series E round, led by Singapore based impact investing fund ABC World Asia. The round also saw strong participation from existing investors – Coatue, Tiger Global, GGV Capital, Westbridge, among others. With this round of funding, Vedantu’s valuation is at $1 billion, and it underlines its status as the largest K-12 LIVE online tutoring company in India, the company said.
The company looks to continue to innovate further on the LIVE teaching format and penetrate deeper in the K-12 segment by reaching more students. The funds will be used primarily to strengthen product engineering functions as well as to expand into newer categories through both organic and inorganic routes.
“Challenging the status quo in India’s K-12 tutoring space, Vedantu was the first company to offer LIVE online classes in 2014 and is credited with creating the category. It has continued to be a pioneer in the space with several innovations that include WAVE, its proprietary LIVE teaching platform, and the 2-teacher model. Both these innovations are playing a big role in improving student outcomes for the company,” Vedantu said in a statement.
Today, Vedantu offers tutoring courses to students ranging from 3 to 18 years, as well as preparation for competitive exams such as IIT-JEE, NEET, CBSE, ICSE, and state exams such as Maharashtra boards. Through its newest offering and fastest growing vertical, SuperKids, it offers extracurricular classes like English Speaking, Reading, and Coding.
Vamsi Krishna, the company’s CEO and co-founder said, “Back in 2014 when we held our first LIVE class, nobody believed this would work. It is super satisfying to see this format becoming mainstream and Vedantu leading the way in innovative online delivery experiences. We will continue to innovate to reach as many students as possible and create 10x better experiences and outcomes for every child at Vedantu.”
Claiming to be the leader in the K-12 LIVE tutoring space, the company says that each month over 35 million users access Vedantu through its app and web for free. Its YouTube channel gets 65 million views, the highest in the K-12 segment for any educational company in India, it further claims. Students also access Vedantu through its dedicated channels on Airtel TV and TATA Sky.
Vedantu said it catered to over 2,00,000 paying students last year, a 300% growth over the previous year. “This growth was accompanied by a revenue increase of 4.5x over the previous year, making it the fastest growing online education company in this space and the overall second-largest company in K-12 in terms of revenue and number of students,” the company said.