Masai School Secures $10 Mn Funding To Add Scholarships, Upskilling Courses

Edtech skilling platform Masai School has secured $10 Mn in its Series B funding round led by Omidyar Network India. 

Existing investors including India Quotient, Unitus Ventures and Alteria Capital also participated in the round.

Masai School has also roped in Indian cricketer Mithali Raj and footballer Bhaichung Bhutia as brand ambassadors. 

The two sports icons also announced scholarships– ‘Mithali Raj Scholarship for Women in Tech’ and ‘Bhaichung Scholarship for Extracurricular Excellence’. These scholarships will offer financial assistance of up to INR 1.5 Cr to selected students every year. 

The development came two weeks after Masai School reportedly raised $4.77 Mn in its Pre-Series B funding round from India Quotient and Unitus Ventures. 

Set up in 2019 by Prateek Shukla, Nrupul Dev and Yogesh Bhat, Masai offers web development and data analytics online courses to college graduates.

“The common thought in India is that when a woman chooses her sporting career, her personal life takes a backseat. However, with Masai, Every individual gets yet another chance to have another career option apart from sports and excel in it,” Mithali Raj said.  

Masai said that it will introduce an upskilling course called MasaiX for Indian software developers and other tech professionals. It is also rolling out a prepaid program called Scholar Program to help college students learn industry-specific skills along with their academics.  

In 2021, the edtech startup secured $5 Mn in its Series A funding round from Omidyar Network India, Unitus Ventures, India Quotient and AngelList.

The startup claims that about 7K students are presently enrolled across all batches. It stated that it placed 2K+ students with an average salary package of INR 7.5 Lakh annually in companies including Ola, Swiggy, Meesho, Capgemini, Paytm, Dream 11, GlobalLogic and ShareChat, among others. 

Its cap table includes CRED’s Kunal Shah,  Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Delhivery’s Mohit Tandon and Tracxn’s Abhishek Goyal, among others. 

The current fundraising has happened at a time when India’s edtech space is badly impacted by the changing customers’ behaviour, funding crunch, inflation and geopolitical tensions, among others. 

The opening of schools and colleges is one of the prime reasons that impacted the revenue and sales of online edtech players which largely focussed on college and school students as their target audience. As a result, edtech startups felt the need of pivoting into hybrid models and spending heavily on customer acquisition, in turn, increasing their (cash) burn rate. 

As an aftermath of high cash burn, negative investor sentiment and other cited problems, edtech startups have so far laid off nearly 7000 employees, according to an Inc42 analysis.

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UPDATE | December 23, 04:50 PM

The story has been edited to reflect that Mithali Raj and Bhaichung Bhutia are only the brand ambassadors for Masai School, not investors, following a clarification issued by the platform.

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