The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has invested about $900K (INR 6 Cr) in edutainment startup, ConveGenius.
The investment is expected to further empower ConveGenius’ (CG) agenda of taking engaging, impactful education to millions of children by 2020 and nearly 90,000 children by the end of 2016 alone.
Talking about the investment, Prachi Windlass, Director for Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s India Education portfolio said, “Unlike most EdTech companies that are spending all their time and resources on creating more content, ConveGenius has taken a bold approach: to be a platform leveraging already available content in order to focus its energies on effective delivery and impact.”
Founded in 2013 by IIIT Hyderabad alumni Jairaj Bhattacharya and Shashank Pandey, ConveGenius is an EdTech platform that offers learning programmes that enhance grade-level competencies for primary school children. It is based out of India and Singapore. The India office is headquartered in Noida. Its flagship product, CG Slate is a tablet-based solution that offers curated, age-appropriate content in an engaging format that helps children enjoy learning.
ConveGenius is a mobile first, product company focussed on digitising education and making it affordable, fun and rewarding. ConveGenius is ‘mobile-only’, and offers products focussed on education and skill development via smartphones by using gamification, adaptive analytics, and intelligent content aggregation.
It curates content from several, leading companies such as Mexus Education (Iken), StoryWeaver from Pratham Books and Chipper Sage. It uses assessments and data analytics tools to track the progress being made by students in real time, to provide them with personalised learning paths and tailor-made content to suit their individual needs.
Jairaj Bhattacharya, founder, ConveGenius said, “We are excited to be backed by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation in our endeavors to reach three million children across India and other emerging markets by 2020 as we strive to bridge the gap between the availability and accessibility of good quality educational content. With the current investment, we seek to scale our operations, build on our existing archive of educational content and further strengthen our technology for self-learning by building in intelligence and Adaptivity on the CG Slate platform.”
Available to NGOs and state governments at a price of about INR 4500/year, CG Slate is expected to reach nearly 90,000 children across the country by 2016 end.
Earlier in June this 2016, CG partnered with Lenovo to launch the first National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) mapped learning tablet for classes KG to 5 making it available to parents for purchase on ecommerce site, Flipkart, for the first time.
Prior to this in November 2015, ConveGenius raised about $300K (INR 2 Cr.) in pre-series A round of funding via Enablers.
Founded in 1999, the central mission of the US-based Michael & Susan Dell Foundation is transforming the lives of children living in urban poverty through better education, family economic stability and health. Since 2006, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has invested more than $147 Mn (INR 983 Cr) in non-profit and social enterprises in India.
In May 2016, The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation earmarked an additional $50 Mn (about INR 333 Cr) towards investments in the country over the next three years.
The foundation has planned to use the amount primarily for making direct investments in the early-stage ventures along with its existing seed-stage fund, India Educational Investment Fund (IEIF).
