Bengaluru-based edtech startup Teachmint has raised USD 3.5 million in Seed round from Lightspeed India and existing investors Better Capital and Titan Capital. Prior to this, it had raised its first round of funding in August.
The five-month-old company claims to have onboarded 120,000 tutors in over 1,000 cities. It will use the fresh funds to build its product suite further, bring additional offerings, and expand its reach to tutors.
Founded by Mihir Gupta, Payoj Jain, Divyansh Bordia, and Anshuman Kumar in May 2020, when India was still under lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Teachmint has developed a mobile-first, video-first SaaS platform that enables tutors to digitize their classrooms. It allows them to give live lectures, engage with students, and evaluate them, among other things.
According to Harsha Kumar, Partner at Lightspeed India, India’s tutoring and coaching market, which is estimated to be over USD 25 billion, is fragmented into millions of tutors and coaching centers.
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“Teachmint is ideally placed to not just enable this market but potentially expand it further,” Kumar said in a statement.
To cater to the needs of the highly localized tutoring or coaching market, Teachmint has made the platform available in 10 Indian languages other than English, which has lead to an increased platform adoption across the country.
Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, an early backer of Teachmint, said the startup has been able to execute its vision of getting tutors from across India on the platform at a fast pace.
“Teachers are at the center of a great education experience, and this is what will truly unleash the power of EdTech,” Mihir Gupta, co-founder and CEO at Teachmint said. “Our mission is to enable millions of outstanding tutors in India to take their classes online by leveraging Teachmint as their tech backbone.”
This year, investors have begun to bet big on startups that are digitizing offline and unorganized tutoring space in the country. Earlier this month, another Bengaluru-based edtech startup Winuall raised USD 2 million in funding from Prime Venture Partners, Beenext, and Ramakant Sharma, the founder of LivSpace, among other angel investors. Founded in 2019, Winuall digitizes offline classes of private tutors and tuition institutes. New Delhi-based Classplus that offers similar solutions for tutors and tuition institutes raised USD 9 million in May in its Series A round led by RTP Global.
Overall, funding in the edtech space quadrupled to USD 1.5 billion in the first nine months of 2020, compared to USD 409 million raised in 2019, according to Venture Intelligence.
