Jungle leads $17m round for India edtech, fintech player
Singapore’s Jungle Ventures has led a $17 million Series B round for Leap Finance, a financial technology provider targeting the Indian education space.
Jungle has described the deal as its first investment in the education sector. Sequoia Capital India and US edtech specialist Owl Ventures also joined the round. Sequoia led a $5.5 million Series A for the company last year.
This is Jungle’s second Indian investment in a matter of weeks, following participation in a $16 million Series D extension for online insurance broker Turtlemint. The VC firm primarily targets Southeast Asia, but also invests outside the region where it believes it can help with expansion into Southeast Asia or globally.
Leap, whose core service is a platform that helps Indian students study overseas, will use the fresh capital to enter new geographies. Operations currently extend to Canada, the UK, and Australia. It also plans to double headcount to around 200 and enlarge its financial products offering to include insurance and international credit cards.
The company aims to make international education more accessible to Indian students by providing US dollar-denominated loans, which feature lower interest rates than rupee loans, with no collateral required. It also offers career services, visa advice, and helps students open US bank accounts with debit cards while they are still in India. This service is said to incur no charges.
The platform, which also includes a chat function and a counseling and guidance service called Leap Scholar, is said to have more than 500,000 members and some 200,000 monthly active users. It facilitated overseas studies for more than 20,000 students in the past year. This figure is hoped to reach 150,000 in 2021.
Last month, Indian fintech start-up Zolve raised $15 million in seed funding for a model that provides Indians overseas and foreigners in India with financial products that are often difficult to access without local credit histories. The idea is that global financial systems are archaic and fragmented, creating headwinds for “global citizens.” Zolve estimates this is an $85 billion market.
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