Bengaluru-based Multibhashi, an online platform for learning English and other Indian languages, has raised funding from RareJob, a leading Japanese English tutorial company, and other investors.
While the company did not disclose the amount, it said the newly raised funds will be used to expand its customer base, enhance its product and technology and strengthen its team.
Founded in 2016 by Anuradha Agarwal, Multibhashi operates a mobile app which enables users to learn English and other Indian languages effectively and effortlessly. It has about a dozen languages including English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, and Oriya. The statup claims to currently have more than 1.5 million users.
Multibhashi is one of the few learning apps which have a chatbot and a voice bot making learning much more immersive. The startup also has a community feature which encourages peer learning in the app. Users of premium/paid courses are offered with live support by human tutors. Multibhashi’s latest version has audio-visual courses and quizzes to learn English from almost all Indian languages and vice versa.
Commenting on the latest funding and its future plans with the funds, Anuradha Agarwal, CEO and Founder, Multibhashi, said,
“Staying true to the mission, we have raised this recent round to strengthen the team, improve the product and penetrate deeper into the market.”
Multibhashi said it primarily targets 460 million blue and grey collar professionals in India who are looking to improve their communication skills in English to enhance their career prospects.
Speaking on the investment, Gaku Nakamura, CEO, RareJob, said,
“When we looked at the players in the Indian English education ecosystem, most of them were either brick or mortar models which were neither scalable nor affordable for the end-customer or online players which only enabled self-learning and focused more on gamification and engagement metrics.”
“Among these varied players, Multibhashi stood out with its unwavering focus on learning outcomes and a unique model to deliver real learning outcomes with a combination of self-learning and tutor-led learning.”
RareJob is one of the leading online English as Second Language platforms in Japan. It connects students to home-based tutors via an online platform or video chat for English lessons. Started its journey as a small startup in 2007, RareJob quickly reached new heights and today it is a public listed company in Japan. The company had also invested in Thailand’s online English conversation operator Globish earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Multibhashi’s Anuradha said in a statement that the company is looking forward to learning from the Japanese player’s experience of having scaled the product and the team in a competitive market. The company said that it aims to become a go-to player for anyone trying to learn English and also plans to expand to other Indian languages and neighbouring countries, which have a similar economic profile and aspirations to learn English.
Multibhashi had last raised its seed funding in 2017 from angel investor Aniruddha Malpani and Startup Oasis, a joint initiative of Rajasthan State Industrial Development and Investment Corporation and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship, IIM Ahmedabad.
