Tiger Global leads $35m Series C for India's Classplus
Tiger Global Management has led a $65 million Series C round for Classplus, an India-based education technology platform through which teachers can distribute, track, and monetize content.
GSV Ventures, a specialist education technology investor out of the US, also came in as a new investor, while existing backers Alpha Wave Incubation, Blume Ventures, and RTP Global re-upped. Classplus is now valued at $250 million according to a Mint report referenced on the company's LinkedIn page. Techcrunch reported that the transaction comprised new and existing shares.
The Series A and B rounds – of INR625.7 million ($8.2 million) and INR750.8 million, respectively – both closed in 2020, AVCJ Research's records show. RTP led the Series A with participation from Blume, Sequoia Capital India's Surge program, Spiral Ventures, and Strive. RTP and Blume re-upped for the Series B, which was led by Alpha Wave Incubation.
Classplus received seed and pre-Series A funding from the likes of Rising Stars, Gree Ventures, Spiral, Times Internet, Blume, and Surge.
Established in 2018 by Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal, the company's business model has been compared to that of Shopify in the e-commerce space. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that enables educators to deliver live lessons, automate daily tasks, run student engagement programs, conduct assessments, and receive payments.
Classplus claims to have signed up more than 100,000 tutors across 1,500 cities who serve a combined total of 20 million students. Over 80% of users are located outside top-tier cities.
"We are on a mission to ensure that every educator can go online and connect with their students across the world. The power of educators has historically been confined to their local neighborhoods. With Classplus, educators have been able to build and expand their online presence, and monetize their content without any major investment and effort" said Rustagi, who is also the company's CEO.
The new capital will be used for product development, recruiting additional staff across engineering, product development and business development, and geographic expansion.
"When lockdowns struck India, Classplus emerged as the critical infrastructure software for the $30 billion offline tutoring industry. With the platform growing nearly 10x in the last 12 months, GSV views it as a ‘weapon of mass instruction,'" said Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at GSV, in a statement.
India's edtech thesis aims to reconcile a strong cultural prioritization of education with poor infrastructure and resources in rural areas. Investment has boomed since the start of the pandemic with increasing interest – both among investors and the general public – in remote services. Byju's, a provider of video-based lessons to K-12 students, recently raised $340 million at a $16.5 billion valuation.
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