Zishaan Hayath’s Edtech Startup Toppr Grabs $10 Mn From Fidelity, Saif & Helion

Mumbai-based digital ed-tech startup, Toppr has raised about $10 Mn in the second round of funding led by Fidelity and its existing investors which includes Saif and Helion. The startup, founded by Zishaan Hayath, had previously raised $2 Mn from Saif and Helion over a year back.

The startup has recently also acquired EasyPrep, another online platform to help students prepare for entrance exams.

The entrance exam preparation market for K12 students is pegged at $8 Bn which is growing at about 20% every year. Since its inception, Toppr, has focused on democratizing education by making it more accessible and affordable for all. Toppr claims to have more than 40% students enrolled from Tier II / III cities. These are the students who lag behind in quality education and teaching, to which Toppr is being a facilitator acting as their lifeline and helping them excel in exams. Toppr presently has more than 1,50,000 students benefitting from it.

Founded by Zishaan Hayath in 2013, alongwith Hemanth Goteti, has now grown to a 100 member team. The startup offers a dedicated online test preparation material for students appearing for engineering and medical entrance examinations.

Zishaan says,

At Toppr, we are building a subject learning platform for 5th to 12th grades. Our objective is to make learning intuitive, easily accessible and affordable. There are more school students in India than anywhere else in the world. The number of students in Indian schools is greater than the population of US. Given where we are in education, the only way forward is to solve this problem using technology. I know this sounds obvious, but this is what keeps us up at nights.

We have a fairly good product for XI and XII focused on IIT JEE and AIPMT exams. With this round of funding, we will be building the platform for rest of the classes. We aim to reach 1Mn students by end of this year (now at 170K).

Toppr, currently, is largely concentrating on engineering and medical entrances exam preparation tools, as many as 14 lakh students take the JEE entrance every year while 8 lakh take the medical exam. The startup further plans to explore other segments in test preparation.

Kalaari Capital and Lightbox Ventures backed Embibe.com, Plancess, Testbook are few players that competes with Toppr closely. Testbook, currently, has over 1.2 lakh registered users growing at the rate of 65-70 % Month on Month, over 60 lakh questions solved on the platform and growing at the rate of 40-45% week on week. On the other side, Embibe which had raised $4 Mn earlier, had recently acquired 100 Marks, one of the student guidance platforms for JEE Main, Advanced and Medical, in a cash plus stock deal.

In offline segment, coaching institutes like Resonance, Bansal Classes, FIITJEE and Aakash Institute which charges students over INR 50,000 to upwards of a lakh of rupees annually also pose competition to the online test preparation startups, though the later (online startups) has the advantage, as the cost taken up by them is one-third of what the offline institutes takes.

The development was first reported by TOI.