Tiger Global and Alpha Wave Global led a $70 million Series D investment round for ed-tech startup Classplus. Chimera Ventures, based in Abu Dhabi, has joined the round as a new investor, while RTP Global, an existing investor, has doubled its funds in the company. Classplus intends to use the funds to improve the product and grow its global footprint.
“We will be deploying the freshly infused funds to take our product up by notches and expand our presence globally. Going forward, we will also be investing in new acquisitions and partnerships that will enable us to continue delivering best-in-class experience to the educators and helping them create an impact in the education system by building bigger and stronger businesses,” Classplus CEO and co-founder Mukul Rustagi shared in the statement.
Classplus is a mobile-first software as a service (SaaS) platform that allows educators and content creators to develop an online presence, digitize their offline tuition centres, and offer their courses online. It was founded in 2018 by Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal.
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According to the business, educators on the site also receive immediate feedback from their learners. The tool is constructed and customized by the in-house team. They have access to data that reveals how many students showed up for their classes and how well they did.
Classplus has accumulated over 100,000 instructors and innovators from over 3,000 towns and cities across India, with Blume Ventures and GSV Ventures among its early funders. More than three-quarters of the project’s founders live outside India’s major cities.
The startup, amusingly, also permits them to generate teasers of their classes. “We have ‘Indianized’ the platform with local needs. Just like how you have trailers in movies and shows, these teachers’ classes also have their teasers.”
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On top of it, Rustagi expressed one of the reasons Classplus has been able to make inroads outside of urban India with the localization of content itself.
“The vast majority of classes — academic and non-academic, uploaded on our platform is in local languages with local accents. What we found was that students here want to learn from people they can relate to,” he said.
Within six months of implementing the Classplus platform, these customers are able to raise their profitability by two to three times, according to the startup.
The new funding will be used to expand the company’s reach into smaller Indian cities and villages, as well as expand its product offerings to meet the demands of teachers and creators better. Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia are among the foreign markets where Classplus is expanding.
