Exclusive: Cuemath raising Rs 39 Cr from Manta Ray Capital, Google and Sequoia

Tuition-focused education tech startup Cuemath is raising Rs 39 crore in a tranche led by Manta Ray Ventures along with existing investors Capital G and Sequoia India. According to regulatory filings with the MCA, the firm would be allotting Series B2 CCPS to the aforementioned investors. 

Overall, the Bengaluru-based company will be allotting 100 equity shares and  46,514 Series B2 CCPS shares in this tranche, each at a price of Rs 8329.5.

While Manta Ray Ventures will pick up 100 equity shares and 22,915 CCPS shares by investing Rs 19.17 crore, Sequoia India will be investing about Rs 11.40 crore.

Capital G, the private equity firm operating under Google's holding entity Alphabet Inc., will pour Rs 8.25 crore, as per the filings. The estimated market cap valuation of the company is about Rs 330 crore post this funding tranche.

This extended Series B round is coming for Cuemath after a gap of two years. Previously, it had raised about Rs 100 crore in a Series B round led by Alphabet Inc. and Capital G.

For the unaware, Cuemath provides after-school maths tuition classes. It uses physical worksheets, quiz cards with other tablet-based in-house content. It essentially targets students from lower kindergarten to standard 10.

It operates on a micro-franchisee model, where local tutors sign up with the company to conduct classes at their home. It will stand to gain from the experience of its new investor Manta Ray which already has Edutech startups such as Brainly and Bridge in its portfolio.

Over the past 4-5 years, several after-school tuition startups including Vedantu, Vidyanext, Genius, Flipclass and Cuemath have come into the picture to seize the opportunity. In August this year, Vedantu had raised $42 million from Tiger Global, Westbridge Capital and other existing investors.

While Cuemath emerged as one of the promising startups in the after school learning space, it failed to thrive as anticipated by some analysts. The company hasn’t been growing at par with competitors such as Vedantu. Since Cuemath is a raising a fresh round, it would be interesting to observe how it goes from here.