Chinese educational platform Lele Ketang raises $40m

All existing investors including Lightspeed China Partners, Morningside Venture Capital, New Oriental Group, and BlueRun Ventures re-upped.

Founded in 2014, Lele Ketang provides three-minute videos featuring teachers who graduated from institutions such as Peking University and Tsinghua University. The platform is said to cover 80% of all subject material taught in local elementary, middle and high schools.

Content is delivered via a product called Day Day Practice. Students can use it to preview or review the school-learned knowledge and do exercises online. It has already developed more than 50 million users.

A second product is called Lexuetang, or Le School, targets teachers by helping them develop lessons. To date, it has been used by nearly 300,000 teachers in 50,000 public schools. Lele Ketang claims to have realized profitability for two consecutive years.

Lele Ketang also launched a product targeting educational institutions lower-tier cities last year. It allows students to assemble together to watch recorded lessons developed by the company. The service also makes a local teacher available to address on-the-spot questions. It has been used by 4,000 educational institutions in more than 300 cities and 1,300 towns to date.

About 80% of primary and middle school students in China are in lower-tier cities while the most in-demand teachers are concentrated in top-tier cities. Lele Ketang has aimed to serve unmet demands in these markets with offline demonstration centers in more than 20 third and fourth-tier cities.

China’s education space has seen significant investments since the start of the pandemic, with recent activity including Huohua Siwei, a children's platform specializing in mathematics and science, raising $150 million in a round led by KKR. One of the largest deals came in April with Yuanfudao, closing a $1 billion funding round led by Hillhouse Capital at a valuation of $7.8 billion. 36Kr reported that Yuanfudao has since secured a separate round of $1.2 billion.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Technology
• Consumer
• China
• Education
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Morningside Technologies
• BlueRun Ventures