Mumbai-based edtech startup WhiteHat Jr has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network India.
Owl Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based edtech focused venture capital fund, joined the funding round in backing the startup.
Founded in 2018 by former Discovery Networks CEO Karan Bajaj, WhiteHat Jr helps address a unique gap in the Indian education system. It prepares kids aged 6 to 14 to thrive in this new world by teaching the fundamentals of coding – logic, sequence, structure and algorithmic thinking – and helping them build commercial-ready games, animations and apps. The company has developed its own original coding curriculum and imparts the lessons via one-to-one live, interactive online classes.
The company said the new funds will be used to further strengthen its technology platform, add more courses to the curriculum, and boost its marketing and branding efforts. The startup had earlier raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network India.
Commenting on the development and the company’s mission, Karan Bajaj, Founder and CEO, WhiteHat, was quoted as saying,
“Our mission is to harness the natural creativity of kids and shift their mindset from an early age from being consumers to creators of technology. It’s been heartening to see the projects of kids in the first six months of launch as they are creating immensely creative, high utility digital applications that are bound to have long-term impact.”
WhiteHat reportedly launched its beta in January and since then has enabled 50K student trials with 500 online classes per day being hosted by nearly 100 IIT and IIM teachers.
Lauding the company’s mission and expressing its excitement on the association with WhiteHat, Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, reportedly said,
“We have been privileged to partner with Karan from the concept stage of the company, and been very impressed with their execution and rapid growth. We are excited to strengthen our association with Whitehat Jr’s mission of creating the next generation of innovators and thinkers.”
Namita Dalmia, Principal, Investments, Omidyar Network India, also commented saying,
“We invested in WhiteHat Jr with an aim to improving cognitive skills and we’re heartened to see the impact of its curriculum on kids through improvements in creativity, concentration and logical thinking as well as teachers who’re highly educated women tech professionals returning to the workforce.”
WhiteHat Jr currently offers four levels of courses – Beginner (Grade 1), Intermediate (Grades 2-3), Advanced (Grades 4-6) and Professionals (Grades 7-9). It is reported that early graduates of the course have created professional-ready apps downloadable on the App Store at ages as young as seven years old.
