Binar Gets New Funding from NBA Star Jeremy Lin and a Number of Investors

Startups edutech Binar Academy said it had just closed its latest funding round. As quoted from e27, investors involved in this round are Blue7, JN Capital & Growth Advisory, Scala Group, DGS, MD Capital, and superstar NBA Jeremy Lin.

Basketball player Jeremy Lin invested through JLIN Capital Studio, his investment unit that focuses on impact startups in Asia and the Americas. His investment areas are in the education, finance, property and agriculture sectors.

This round continues the funding acquisition pre-series A in May 2022 then with the involvement of iGlobe Partners, Teja Ventures, YCAB Ventures, and several other investors. At that time, Binar managed to close funding of $3,5 million. Their initial funding was supported by Teja Ventures with the participation of the Indonesia Women Empowerment Fund.

The fresh funds are considered to be able to boost Binar's network, expertise, technology and business prowess in line with its expansion efforts throughout Indonesia.

In an interview with e27, Co-Founder & CEO Twinkle Alamanda Shantika said that his party would reorganize the company in order to achieve profitability through innovation in new services and products.

Since being founded in 2017 by Alamanda, Dita Aisyah, and Seto Lareno, Binar has focused on providing digital skills training through a series of programs. Starting from bootcamp, then digital talent accelerators, to channeling talent to technology companies. Quoting its website, currently Binar has produced more than 180 thousand digital talents and distributed it to more than 1100 business partners.

In the Impact Report recently published by Binar, from these achievements it was concluded that they had succeeded in contributing 5% of Indonesia's digital talent needs out of a total need of 600.000 people. If the value of the figure above is calculated, Binar claims to have made around $12,7 million.

The training provided includes Business Intelligence, Product Management, Mobile Development, UI/UX Development, and others. Apart from that, Binar also provides a number of B2B services for corporate clients, one of which is Binar Pro, a solution training integrated for digitizing materials.

Binar's business path was under pressure due to macroeconomic conditions in 2022. This forced the company to cut 20% of its total employees --- while remaining fully responsible for the rights of affected employees.

In the same landscape, Binar competes directly with a number of startups such as Hacktiv8, Myskill, Algobash, and several others.