CoLearn, the Indonesian EdTech startup has raised $10M in series A investment from Alpha Wave Incubation and US-based EdTech investor GSV. Ventures, including Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and AC Ventures, also participated in the round. The funds will be used to develop its product, technology, marketing and hiring new people.
This series of funds accumulated by CoLearn has made it one of the most well-funded startups in Indonesia so far. The fund-raise, in less than six months of its previous rounds, is the US-based fund’s first investment in Indonesia.
The company has claimed to achieve growth with this funds and will invest this money in designing better products, technology, marketing and hiring best manpower.
Abhay Saboo, Co-Founder and CEO, CoLearn, said: “Despite having the world’s fourth largest education ecosystem with 50 million students, three million teachers and half a million schools, the quality of education in Indonesia has remained much below its real potential for several decades. The scope for motivating students and ensuring they can thrive in a globalized world is what really drives us all at CoLearn.”
This young startup was launched in August 2020 and has scaled their reach to more than 3.5 million students. The company claimed students ask more than five million questions per month, and get answers through CoLearn’s AI platform.
“Many Indonesians are yet to see good education as a means to improve the country’s economic power. Parents here in particular have not connected those dots. Things are now slowly changing and our mission is to accelerate this by improving the quality of education,” Abhay said.
Artificial Intelligence powered in CoLearn helps students solve their doubts instantly with high quality of homework support removes the friction between teacher and students associated with offline tutoring centers. Its step-by-step video solutions created by the best teachers in the country help students overcome the exam anxiety which they have in difficult subjects like maths.
According to CoLearn they are very focused on teacher training programmes to improve the quality of education. They claimed to have more than 200 well trained and educated teachers in the span of next 2 years so that every student gets the equal opportunity to learn from a well trained teacher, hence uplifting the quality of the education in the country.
“We are immensely excited to partner with CoLearn in its mission to disrupt the education market in Indonesia. As one of the largest markets globally, the demand for high quality tutoring solutions at a competitive price point is huge. We believe CoLearn’s stellar team is successfully implementing the online learning playbook we see in other parts of the world, to gain market leadership in Indonesia,” said Anirudh Singh, Managing Director, AWI.
Inflection point
CoLearn stated that Indonesia has been lagging in education investments and innovation when compared to its Asian neighbours. Before COVID-19, students largely relied on offline tutoring centres for supplemental instruction given the limited online alternatives.
Due to increased internet and smartphone penetration coupled with school closures have made the country at an inflection point and have allowed people the rapid adoption of EdTech solutions.
CoLearn also has its strong tech team in India and UAE and they are actively looking to double its team size by the year end with a focus on recruiting for data science, product, and engineering roles.
“GSV is thrilled to be backing CoLearn’s compelling co-founders as they look to bring high quality instruction at scale to Indonesia‘s youth. The opportunity to build efficacious learning solutions is vast. The greatest businesses are created when entrepreneurs tackle large, important problems and CoLearn is doing just that,” said Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner, GSV Ventures.