Edtech startup Classplus is set to kick off its Series A round by raising Rs 73 crore in a tranche led by RTP Global along with Sequoia’s Surge Ventures, Blume Ventures, Strive Investment Partnership and Spiral Ventures.
According to regulatory filings, RTP Global is set to invest Rs 30.16 crore while Surge Ventures would put in Rs 15.08 crore. Blume Ventures will be the third biggest contributor with an investment of Rs 15.03 crore.
Spiral and Strive will participate with Rs 9.8 crore and 2.26 crore respectively. Angel investors Anand Chandrasekaran, Arpan Sheth and Aditya Shukla were the individual investors who participated in the round.
After the Series A round, promoters’ stake would be reduced from 39.25% to 29.6%. Early-stage investor Blume will emerge as the second-largest stakeholder in this round, holding a 15.89% stake. Sequoia’s Mauritius based SPV Surge Ventures and RTP Global will hold 13.23% and 10.14% respectively while remaining investors will have single-digit ownership in the company.
According to Entrackr’s calculation, Classplus will be valued at nearly Rs 300 crore post-Series A, registering 3.75x growth in valuation as compared to its last funding round.
The Noida-based startup had last raised Rs 17.5 crore as part of its pre-Series A round in January this year. Blume Ventures, Surge Ventures and Kunal Shah’s QED Innovation Labs had invested in the company at a valuation of around Rs 80 crore.
As per our sources, Times Internet had also made an early bet on Classplus while TLabs was the first backer of the company.
Founded by Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal, the SaaS-enabled firm enables private coaching institutes and their tutors to streamline their content distribution, payments, communication, and online assessments. Classplus was also in Sequoia Capital’s ‘Surge 2.0’ accelerator program.
As of now, Classplus claims to have over 5,00,000 users and more than 3,000 teachers on the platform across India. It recently released new features to reach more students and educators. Since students have been relying on online classes during the lockdown, it has been tying up aggressively with coaching classes and providing online lessons, tests, and multimedia content to students.
Amid the coronavirus crisis, a recent survey showed that investors will be bullish on the healthcare and education sectors for the next three to twelve months. While the healthcare sector has not seen any notable investments for quite some time, edtech companies have dominated the local funding landscape since the beginning of 2020.
Besides the segment poster boy BYJU’s, Unacademy has also been raising funds fairly regularly. Vedantu also had raised three rounds in the past eight months.
Guvi, Pedagogy, Camp K12, Pariksha and Lido Learning too have raised funds in recent times.
