Eduisfun Raises $28 Mn From Piyush Pandey, Amitabh Bachchan, Others

Mumbai-based edtech startup Eduisfun, on Tuesday (December 24), announced that it has secured funds worth $28 Mn (INR 200 Cr) from angel investors such as actor Amitabh Bachchan, Ogilvy Group chief creative officer Piyush Pandey and PwC partner – assurance Russel Parera.

The company will be utilising the funding to increase its scholarship pool, product development and expand to 1.5 Mn schools across India.

Founded in 2014, Eduisfun was started by Praveen Tyagi and Jatin Solanki. The company develops gamified educational applications for school children belonging to CBSE and ICSE curriculums. Its flagship product STEPApp is an experiential learning app that works on basic smartphones even with low data connectivity and has been designed for students of private, central and tribal schools.

The application is said to eliminate the use of video-based teaching by instructors and instead uses puzzles and games to help students learn concepts better. “The cost of the app is significantly less compared to other edtech platforms,” said Tyagi. The content on the app is said to be curated by a team of 400 IITians.

Parekh said that the entire education system has to change towards storytelling and gamified learning. Storytelling is just one way of teaching. However, another interesting way is to put it in the game where students compete with each other to solve the puzzle and get rewarded or recognised, he added.

Recently, Eduisfun launched a scholarship programme, where it offers INR 10K to INR 1 Cr to financially underprivileged students. The company has partnered with residential schools run by Maharashtra’s tribal development department.

According to a NASSCOM report, more than 3K edtech startups have been incorporated in the last five years. Between 2013 and 2016, the funding has increased by 5x times, and more than 20 active investors have invested about $600 Mn, where 42% went to online courses, 23% to technology and 18% to tutoring. Edtech startups came fourth in terms of the total funding with 23 deals, as per Inc42 DataLabs report in 2017.

Earlier this month, Mumbai-based higher education company Shahani Group’s Smart Institute raised $1.5 Mn in Series A round led by an investment firm Ah! Ventures. Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) venture Embibe acquired 90.5% stake in Bengaluru-based edtech startup Funtoot for $10 Mn (INR 71.64 Cr).

Updated: January 15, 12:47 PM

In the previous version of the article HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh was erroneously mentioned as one of the investors.  The current version of the article has been updated to reflect the changes.