Edtech Startup Flinto Raises $7.2 Mn In Pre-Series B Funding From Lightbox Ventures

Chennai-based edtech startup Flinto Learning Solutions has raised $7.2 Mn in a Pre-Series B round, led by Lightbox Ventures. The early-stage venture capital firm had also participated in the Series A funding round of the startup, which offers a subscription-based product for kids from ages 2-12. 

Founded in 2013 by Vijay Babu Gandhi, Shreenidhi Srirangam and Arunprasad Durairaj, Flinto aims to make the first experience with learning fun and intuitive for children through high-quality educational kits and tools. They also claim to have developed India’s first and only early childhood or pre-primary education R&D centre.

Flintobox, its flagship product, is an educational subscription-box focussed at activity-based learning for the ages 2-12. Banking on the massive popularity of the subscription-based model worldwide for such educational learning kits, Flinto aims to keep kids creatively engaged at home by targeting key areas of child development such as logical reasoning, imagination building and critical thinking. Having being developed at its own R&D centre, Flintobox has seen a great response, having already been adopted by over a million families.

Using the insights from its flagship Flintobox, FlintoClass termed as “pre-school in a box” was launched in 2017 and has quickly grown to more than 700 pre-schools in eight countries. While Flintobox caters to students and parents, FlintoClass is targeted towards pre-school owners, teachers and students.

In recent times the edtech startup has come up with FlintoClass@Home, a hybrid pre-school learning experience. A monthly subscription product, FlintoClass@Home comes with an easy-to-use preschool kit and pre-recorded learning sessions. In less than a month, it claims to have seen over 3,000 enrollments already. With this fresh infusion of capital, Flinto will look to build on its new product, in view of the uncertainties regarding the pandemic. 

The countrywide school and college shutdown has brought edtech to the fore. Right from the very first week of the lockdown in India, edtech platforms moved to capitalise on the growth wave and it resulted in an unprecedented spike in user registrations and time spent on online learning platforms. The other edtech startups which have raised capital during the nationwide lockdown include Vedantu, Pariksha, Classplus, BYJU’S, Pedagogy, Instasolv, Edvizo, Guvi, Camp K12, Winuall, and Ken42, among others. 

According to SimilarWeb, based on a study of 35 top online learning platforms, the edtech segment saw a 26% increase in user visits between April 2019 to March 2020, as compared to April 2018 – March 2019. Further, the first 28 days of lockdown in India edtech segment saw 128.8 Mn visits (on average, 4.6Mn daily visits) as compared to 102.2 Mn average visits between April 2019 – Feb 2020. 

According to Datalabs by Inc42, there are around 4,450 edtech startups in India. According to DataLabs’ ‘The Future Of India’s $2 Bn Edtech Opportunity Report 2020’, capital inflows into the test preparation and online certification segments are comparatively higher. Together, these two make up for 88% of the total funding in edtech startups.

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