Gredu to Close Series A Funding, Mapping for Expansion This Year

Edtech becomes one of the few sectors that has been gaining positive impact during the pandemic. The new online habit of teaching and learning activities through digital channels has made Gredu's distance learning system the best option for schools. Entering the new year, Gredu aims for expansion as the next focus.

Gredu's Sales Lead, Theresia Andina said that the team is targeting to collaborate with at least 200 schools or convertible to 70 thousand new users for the first quarter of this year. The expansion will be focused on areas such as Pangandaran, Yogyakarta, Tangerang, Cirebon, and Southeast Sulawesi.

"From 2021 onwards, there is still a great potential in Indonesia to be explored, although each school has different facilities and infrastructure," Andina said.

Market expansion certainly requires additional capital. Andina mentioned that Gredu has prepared to raise another funding round this year. "Series A funding in the middle of the year," she added.

When Gredu introduced the school digitization app in January 2020, they announced the pre-series A funding led by Vertex Ventures. Meanwhile, in the seed funding round, they received fund from angel investors and Global Wakaf Corporation.

2021's current plans

In addition to school collaboration for distance learning, Andini explained, Gredu had done several other things. Some of these include running mobile assistance campaigns for students in need of online training.

Starting from here, Gredu claims to have 350 thousand users across Jabodetabek, West Java, East Kalimantan, Aceh, West Sumatra, Bengkulu, Bangka Belitung and Ambon.

The number of school partners increased significantly, from under a hundred to 300 schools. Andini said this condition would not last forever because the pandemic would end and teaching and learning activities would return to normal.

However, Andini optimistic their learning management system (LMS) platform will not be left out by the school after the pandemic. The reason is, she thought, what has changed after the pandemic will be limited to teaching and learning activities, but not for other school management activities.

"Therefore, we will continue exploring ways to digitize all the processes. Therefore, all the necessary processes at school will be provided by Gredu," Andini said.

Gredu alone has been around since 2016 with the founding team Mohammad Fachri (CTO), Rizky Anies (CEO), and Ricky Putra (COO). In January 2020, they introduce a school digitization platform which turned out to be aligned with the school's needs affected by the pandemic.

With a B2B business model, Gredu offers SaaS services to digitize school processes from attendance, scheduling, teaching, and learning activities, to monitoring channels for parents of students.

According to data summarized by the Edtech Report 2020 released by DSResearch, the education management platform has indeed become one of the fastest-growing innovations in Indonesia and the regional market. Apart from Gredu, in Indonesia, there are also several startups that offer similar services, including Quintal, InfraDigital, and Codemi.

In June 2020, InfraDigital has secured the series A Funding led by AppWorks after receiving seed funding in February 2019.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian