Lido Learning Bags $3 Mn Funding From Picus Capital, Paytm President

Mumbai-based edtech startup Lido Learning on Monday announced that it has raised $3 Mn in Series B funding. The investment has come in from existing investors and new investors including Rocket Internet founder Alex Samwer-backed Picus Capital and Paytm president Madhur Deora.

Lido Learning founder and CEO Sahil Sheth said that considering the current global pandemic, learning online has become the need of the hour. “This is pulling the Indian market towards adopting online tutorials much faster than initially expected and is a huge tailwind enabling us to become a dominant category creator within a short span of time,” Sheth added.

Before this round, Lido Learning raised $3 Mn in its Series A round led by Ronnie Screwvala, chairman of another edtech startup upGrad. Other investors in the round included Medlife CEO Ananth Narayanan, MD JK Tyres Vikrampati Singhania, CEO, Shaadi.com Anupam Mittal and MD of Patni Wealth Advisors Arihant Patni, among others.

“Lido Learning has built a very comprehensive and targeted product to take the Indian tutoring market online and to deliver real value to its students. The tremendous growth in the months since launch has proofed the great product-market fit they have found,” said Florian Reichert, a partner at Picus Capital.

Lido Learning, which was founded in April 2019 by Sahil Sheth, provides year-long online tutorials in math and science for students of class 5 to 9. Lido enables students to connect online with live teachers who offer maths and science tutorials. Parents pay a subscription fee for their kids to attend small group classes through real-time interactions with teachers.

The platform also provides students access to offline content to practise classroom lessons. Besides maths and science, Lido was looking to launch English tutorials in the first quarter of 2020.

According to Datalabs by Inc42, in 2019, K-12 and test prep startups such as BYJU’s, Unacademy and Vedantu attracted the most amount of venture capital funding. The combined capital inflow into the three startups for the year 2019 was more than $274 Mn.

Overall the dominance of these sub-sectors in the funding landscape of edtech startups has declined a little. The share of online test preparation startups to the total funding amount in 2019 was 66% ($284 Mn) out of the total $433 Mn plus in total funding amount for the year.

With a huge demand for tech intervention in the school curriculum, hiring the right fit of teachers is the toughest task for most K-12 focussed startups.