CoLearn Announces Series A Funding of 143 Billion Rupiah, Enlivens Local Edtech Competition

Startups EdTech CoLearn announced that it has secured a series A funding of $10 million or equivalent to IDR 143 billion. This investment round was attended by a number of investors, including Alpha Wave Incubation, GSV Ventures -- as well as venture capitalists in their initial funding round, namely Surge (Sequoia Capital India) and AC Ventures. The company plans to use these fresh funds to develop products, technology and marketing.

"Despite having the fourth largest education ecosystem in the world with 50 million students, 3 million teachers, and around half a million schools; for decades the quality of education in Indonesia has remained far below its true potential. Passion to motivate students and ensure they can succeed in the world What's going global is what drives all of us at CoLearn," said Abhay Saboo, Co-Founder & CEO of CoLearn.

Abhay continued, "Many Indonesians are not aware that education is a means to improve the country's economic strength. Parents have not connected the two points. But now, things are slowly changing. Our mission is to accelerate that change by improving the quality of education."

Besides Abhey, CoLearn was co-founded by Marc Irawan and Sandeep Devaram. Since the app launched in August 2020, they currently claim to have 3,5 million students. In its early debut, CoLearn was also supported by several investors seed [in addition to those mentioned above], including Leo Capital, TNB Aura, S7V, January Capital, Alpha JWC Venutres, Taurus Ventures, Alter Global, and Mahanusa Capital.

One of their mainstay features is that it allows students to ask for solutions in answering questions in a lesson (in doing homework) -- an average of 5 million questions are uploaded per month. In the system, AI technology is embedded so that it automates the solution discovery process.

CoLearn also has educational content services that are packaged in video on-demand and class sessions live online delivered interactively by experienced tutors. It also has a training program for teachers. The target is, in the next 2 years they want to be able to train 200 teachers, especially in the STEM field.

A similar service is also offered by startups EdTech others, for example to help answer the lesson questions, Ruangguru has a "Roboguru" feature combining Photo Search capabilities and User Generated Content helps students do their homework independently at home. Meanwhile for learning content, besides Ruangguru also has the same service, there are other platform providers like Zenius and Quipper also play there.

Sector EdTech quite accelerated due to the pandemic. Educational activities flock to online, create service EdTech be chosen to accompany activities school from home. Investors see this as the first step to getting more serious about this business landscape. Throughout Q1 2020 there are at least 3 funding targeting business EdTech -- throughout 2020 there were 10 transactions.

GSV Ventures, a CoLearn investor, specializes in educational technology. In her remarks, Managing Partner Deborah Quazzo said, "The opportunity to build successful learning solutions for the world's fourth largest country is enormous. The best businesses are created when entrepreneurs take big and important problems and solve them. CoLearn is doing just that. that."

To date Ruangguru become a startup EdTech with the largest valuation in Indonesia. Our internal data states that they have achieved aspiring unicorn final stage (valuation close to $1 billion). Earlier this week they just announced fundraising $55 million which is a continuation of the C series raised by the company.