CoLearn Announces 143 Billion Rupiah Series A Funding, Heating up Local Edtech Competition

CoLearn edtech announced series A funding worth of $10 million or equivalent to 143 billion Rupiah. This investment round involved some investors, including Alpha Wave Incubation, GSV Ventures - as well as venture capitalists in their initial funding round, namely Surge (Sequoia Capital India) and AC Ventures. The company plans to use this fresh fund to develop products, technology and marketing.

"Despite having the fourth largest education ecosystem in the world with 50 million students, 3 million teachers and about half a million schools; the quality of education in Indonesia has remained far below its true potential for decades. A passion to motivate students and ensure them to be succeed in the global world is what drives us all at CoLearn," CoLearn's Co-Founder & CEO, Abhay Saboo said.

Abhay continued, "Many Indonesians do not realize that education is a means to improve the country's economic strength. Parents have not connected the two points. However, it slowly changes. Our mission is to accelerate this change by improving the quality of education."

Apart from Abhey, CoLearn was also founded by Marc Irawan and Sandeep Devaram. Since the application launching in August 2020, they currently claim to have 3.5 million students. In its debut, CoLearn was supported by several seed investors [apart from those already mentioned above], including Leo Capital, TNB Aura, S7V, January Capital, Alpha JWC Venutres, Taurus Ventures, Alter Global, and Mahanusa Capital.

One of its main features is to allow students asking for solutions in answering questions in a certain lesson (doing homework) - around 5 million questions in average are uploaded per month. There's an AI technology embedded in the system, therefore, it automates the process of finding solutions.

CoLearn also provides educational content services packaged in on-demand video and live online class sessions, interactively delivered by experienced tutors. It also has a training program for teachers. They have target to train 200 teachers, especially in the STEM field in the next 2 years.

Other edtech startups offer similar services, for example, Ruangguru has a "Roboguru" feature, combining Photo Search and User Generated Content capabilities to help students do homework independently at home. In terms of learning, besides Ruangguru, there are other platform providers such as Zenius and Quipper competing in the field.

The edtech sector has been stepping up the game due to the pandemic. Educational activities are getting online, making edtech services an option to guide school from home activities. Investors can see this as a first step to get serious about working on this business landscape. During Q1 2020 there were at least 3 funding targeting the edtech business -  there were 10 transactions throughout 2020.

GSV Ventures, CoLearn's investor, specializes in educational technology. In his remarks, Deborah Quazzo as Managing Partner said, "The opportunity to build successful learning solutions for the fourth largest country in the world is enormous. The best businesses are created when entrepreneurs take big and important problems and solve them. CoLearn is doing that thing."

Until now, Ruangguru has become the edtech startup with the largest valuation in Indonesia. Our internal data says that they have reached the final stage of the unicorn aspiring (valuation is close to $1 billion). Earlier this week, they announced $55 million funding as a follow-on round of the series C.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian