Uolo from India raises $22.5 million to promote edtech
- ByStartupStory | December 9, 2022
In a funding round led by UAE-based VC fund Winter Capital, Uolo, an Indian edtech platform that collaborates with private K–12 schools to provide online learning programmes to middle- and low-income families, has raised $22.5 million.The great majority of edtech businesses use a business-to-consumer strategy and invest in advertising to connect with the student’s parents and guardians.
By using a business-to-business-to-consumer approach and collaborating with private schools to allow them to offer online learning programmes to their kids and levy the fees as part of the school tuition, Uolo claims it is decreasing that cost. The agenda of the startup is also created in tandem with the course offerings of the affiliated schools, making it more straightforward for students to reinforce the same concepts.
The Gurugram-based firm creates and offers specialised learning curricula for English speaking and coding. These apps are accessible to students on their parents’ smartphones.
“We bring edtech to India’s people. According to Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo, in an interview with TechCrunch, “and when we do that, the idea is that you make it inexpensive enough, affordable enough for folks to be able to take it for their children.”
According to him, the business can give its services to students for a lot less money. The Uolo School Platform, an ERP platform, is provided without charge to schools that partner with Uolo. It is a single platform that allows schools to access fee management, report card management, and attendance monitoring. The ERP platform serves as a gateway for Uolo since it enables the firm to establish an ecosystem once it is adopted by schools. This encourages parents or guardians to utilise the app to get messages from schools directly rather than utilising customary routes like WhatsApp groups.
In order for digital learning to flow through us, Pandey added, “we need to get schools and students on one end of the platform. Uolo, which was established in September 2020 by Pandey and his brother Ankur, currently reaches 3.7 million students and has partnerships with more than 8,500 schools in India.
The $22.5 million funding was provided through an equity-debt mix Series A round, which included participation from Uolo’s current investors Blume Ventures and Winter Capital, as well as a new fund based in Dubai called Morphosis Venture Capital. Pandey told TechCrunch that the debt component consisted of optionally convertible debentures that would eventually convert into equity, though specifics regarding the equity and debt percentage involved were not made public.
The startup, which employs about 350 people, intends to use the funding to expand its learning programmes with courses in STEAM subjects in the upcoming months and reach 50,000 schools across India over the course of the next four years. For the latter, it seeks to collaborate with educational institutions as well as individuals and organisations dedicated to creating high-quality content.
“India’s initial wave of edtech startups has shown that there is a market for online learning. They lacked an economical distribution, though. We predict that a new generation of edtech businesses will be able to establish organic, inexpensive distribution, enabling students to study for $10 per year as opposed to $10 per hour. According to a prepared statement by Winter Capital’s managing director Anton Farlenkov, “Our investment in Uolo is based on our confidence in this type of company.
Follow Startup Story
Related Posts
