Classplus, a mobile OS for private tutoring businesses, commonly known as coaching centres in India, has raised a pre-series A round of $2.5 million from Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital India’s rapid scale-up program Surge.
The round also saw participation from marquee angels such as Kunal Shah (Founder of CRED and Freecharge), Alvin Tse (GM, Xiaomi-Indonesia), Eric Kwan (Partner at Locus Ventures), amongst others.
Started in 2018 by Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal, Classplus is a mobile first SaaS platform for private coaching centres. It helps coaching centres take their business online and streamline all their communication, content distribution, payments and online assessments through the app thereby reducing their time spent on management activities and focusing more on classroom teaching. It brings tutors, students and parents on one platform for better communication and enables tutors to track each student’s performance on the app and provide personalized learning experience to each kid.
Presently, 3000+ tutors across 50+ Indian cities use Classplus to cater to over 500k students on a regular basis and drive pre-classroom and post-classroom engagement.
Speaking about the company and its plans to use the new funds, Mukul Rustagi, Co-founder, Classplus, said,
“We caught on to the smartphone internet wave pretty early and realized this might be the de-facto medium via which tutors and students would use the internet as a productivity tool in the future. This fundraise will be primarily used to ramp-up our technology. We are jumping orbitals and we welcome strong pilots to steer the rocketship. We are currently a team of 150+ and looking forward to bolster it across engineering, product and business verticals.”
Classplus aims to streamline this massive but fragmented market by helping tutors run all their communication, payments, assessments and online learning programs on a full-stack mobile solution that doubles up as their online content repository. It also acts as a new-age digital distribution platform for education content and products, enabling tutors to set up e-commerce channels that make video content and online assessments available to their students.
Sajith Pai, who leads edtech investments at Blume Ventures, commented on the investment saying,
“At Blume, we are excited by Mukul & Bhaswat’s vision of a platform that empowers the hundreds of thousands of tuition and test prep centres throughout India to better serve their students, thereby enhancing learning for students, and improving earning opportunities for these entrepreneurs who run these tuition and test prep centres.”
In India, tutors are often the primary channel for external supplementary academic support. 70 million plus students in India take tuitions every year, keeping the age-old guru-shishya culture alive in hyperlocal retail tutoring stores across the nook and corners of the country.
