Square Peg leads $40m round for Singapore edtech player
Australia-based Square Peg Capital has led a USD 40m Series B round for Singapore-based education technology provider Cialfo.
Seek Investments, a unit of Australia-listed recruitment company Seek, also participated. Existing investors SIG Global, Vulcan Capital, DLF Venture, and January Capital re-upped. It brings total funding since inception to USD 55m, including a USD 15m Series A last year featuring Altos Ventures and Susquehanna International Group among others.
Cialfo was founded in 2017 by Rohan Pasari, Stanley Chia, and William Hund with a view to simplifying international higher education applications for 100 million students globally. Recent operations have focused on improving education experiences, with the company citing a steep drop-off in student satisfaction during the pandemic.
Core operations include connecting high school students, their counsellors, and families with more than 1,000 colleges. The company says it has achieved trusted partner status with globally recognised universities including Imperial College London in the UK, The University of Chicago, and IE University in Spain. It has about 170 employees across Singapore, India, China, and the US.
The Series B capital will be used for global expansion and technology development in areas such as career exploration and college applications. Among the enhancements planned for 2022 is Direct Apply, a tool that allows students and counsellors to apply, track, and send documents to hundreds of programs globally, using a single application form.
“Cialfo is a vessel to manifest the shared passion of its co-founders to transform international education for the better,” Tushar Roy, a Singapore-based partner at Square Peg, said in a statement.
“It is a passion born of each founder’s personal experience, be it Rohan moving from India to Singapore for university and experiencing first-hand the friction and misaligned interests inherent in the status quo, or Stanley chasing his lifelong passion to make education more accessible.”
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