Omidyar leads $11m Series B for India's Vedantu

Accel Partners also participated. It follows a $5 million Series A from Accel and Tiger Global Management in 2015. The fresh capital will be applied to technological upgrades and an expansion in India's tier-1 and tier-2 cities.

Vedantu provides a live online tutoring platform that allows students to select from a pool of teachers for live interactive online sessions designed to be possible in low-bandwidth conditions. The idea is to create a personalized and democratized learning network, where teachers and students can be connected anytime and anywhere.

The company was founded in 2011 by Vamsi Krishna, Saurabh Saxena, Pulkit Jain and Anand Prakash. The four entrepreneurs launched a test preparation company called Lakshya in 2006, which was acquired by online tutoring center MT Educare in 2012. As part of Lakshya, the founders taught and mentored more than 10,000 students and trained more than 200 teachers between them.

India's education space is said to be the largest globally at the K-12 level, with more than 250 million new enrollments per year. Edtech is considered a significant entry point in this space due to smart phone proliferation and a relative lack of regulatory hurdles. Google and KPMG estimate that the domestic edtech market will grow almost eight-fold over the next five years to about $2 billion.

Recent activity in the technology segment includes a $21 million Series C for Unacademy, and a $25 million investment in Educational Initiatives. In April, a company known as Embibe that uses artificial intelligence to create lessons received a $180 million round. According to AVCJ Research, online tutor Byju's is one of the best funded start-ups in this space, with at least $284 million raised to date.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Technology
• Early-stage
• India
• Accel Partners
• Education