Online Learning Startup Toppr Raised $46Mn in The Fresh Funding Round
One of the largest online learning startups in India Toppr has secured $46 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform including a new product. Toppr operates four products and services that are aimed at K-12 students. Marquee services offered by Toppr’s are students’ live classes and sessions to clear doubts, pre-recorded lessons, and tests. A portion of Toppr’s library is available to students at no charge on the Learning app, but full access requires a membership. The subscription starts at 1,000 Indian rupees and goes as high as 3,000 Indian rupees.
The Mumbai-based seven-year-old startup’s Series D round was led by Dubai-headquartered investment firm Foundation Holdings. Kaizen Private Equity, an existing investor, also participated in the new round, which brings Toppr’s to-date raise to over $92 million.
Toppr founder and chief executive Zishaan Hayath in an interview explained Toppr’s catalog covers 17 subjects and prepares students for five dozen competitive exams.
Hayath explained that the startup launched Codr, a product aimed at helping all school-age children learn computer programming, last month. A Codr session costs about $9.35. Toppr also maintains a free problem- solving app that enables a student to take a picture of a question and get its solution instantly. The app uses character recognition and machine learning to sift through a large bank of problems in background Toppr has amassed over the years to determine its solution. He also added Toppr’s Learning app has amassed over 13 million users, more than 150,000 of whom are paying subscribers. In recent months, the startup has also worked on a new product called School OS, which enables a school to digitize their learning experience. Through School OS, a teacher can assign and collect homework digitally, and students can attend live classes.
Hayath said, “They can also attend classes from previous years, or of grades ahead of them. Our schooling system is built in a way that keeps you locked in the current year’s curriculum. On digital, one of the benefits is that you don’t have to follow such rules. So for instance, if a student in tenth grade needs to brush up some concept from grade nine, they can do so at any moment.” More than 40 schools have deployed School OS for their 60,000 students, he said. The startup plans to have 300,000 students enrolled in School OS in the next few months.
Aakash Sachdev, Managing Director of Foundation Holdings, in a statement, said, “Toppr has emerged as the highest traffic destination for K-12 learning and hosts over 1 million sessions every day. Toppr’s community of 50,000+ educators from across the country has contributed to over 35 lakh learning pieces, including questions, solutions, concepts, games, and videos for the students. Our investment in Toppr also reflects our commitment to empowering great teachers via the new School OS. The new School OS already has 55,000+ learners on it.” Sachdev has joined Toppr’s board as part of the new financing round. Foundation Holdings said it will work with Toppr to make the startup “IPO ready” in the coming years and publicly list on Nasdaq or any other international stock exchange.
Hayath said the startup will continue to focus on scaling its various products and services and also invest a little on marketing — an aspect he said Toppr has never spent any penny on. Another relatively new area for Toppr is exploring merger and acquisition deals. The startup has so far resisted the idea of acquiring a team or firm to grow inorganically but is open to scouting deals for the right fit.
Byju’s, India’s most valuable edtech startup from Mary Meeker’s Bond last month, raised about $23 million. Unacademy, another learning platform in India, acquired a smaller firm PrepLadder for about $50 million earlier this month. And two weeks ago, Vedantu said it had secured $100 million in a fresh financing round.