Zenius Announces Pre Series B Funding; Revenue Boost Supported by "Live Class"

Zenius edtech startup today (05/1) announced the pre-series B funding round with an undisclosed amount. Alpha JWC Ventures and Openspace Ventures joined the list of new investors, participated also in this round the previous investors, Northstar, Kinesys, and BeeNext.

The fund is to be focused on platform development, amidst increasing market demand. Previously, Zenius has announced series A funding worth $20 million in February 2020.

In addition, the online learning platform claimed strong growth throughout 2020. In fact, per second semester last year, income has increased by 70% compared to the same period in 2019. Zenius provided loads of free learning content during the first half of 2020, to support the learning from home initiative in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In June 2020, along with rebranding and app updates, Zenius started adopting a freemium business model. Nearly 50% of Zenius' revenue comes from the Live Class feature. Since its launch in March 2020, user growth is said to increase by 10 times with a retention rate of 90%.

Currently, Zenius receive an average rating of 4.9 (out of 5) for its classes, with attendance reaching 400 students, and breaking records with 10,000 users in one 60-minute math session.

Based on SimilarWeb data, the Zenius.net site gets an average of 3-4 million visits every month. On the Android platform, the application has been downloaded by more than one million users.

“Recently, we launched the Automated Doubt-Solving feature through our application and WhatsApp. This feature will provide a solution to students using only the camera on their cell phone. The system will then recommend a video and practice questions to explain the process behind the solution and allow students to actively apply it in a given set of practice questions. This will create a more immersive learning experience that contributes to students' critical thinking and the ability to solve difficult problems and future concepts,” Zenius' CEO Rohan Monga said.

"For more than a decade, they have made a track record of demonstrating successful learning outcomes and reinventing their core business as new mediums emerge. We believe this track record will be a key differentiating factor in the rapidly evolving education landscape, and we expect that the new funding round will drive Zenius' growth even further," Openspace Ventures' Director Ian Sikora said.

Edtech in Indonesia

According to data summarized in the Edtech Report 2020 by DSResearch, there are currently some fast-growing education startup business models in Southeast Asia. Zenius alone is in the “Learner Support, Tutoring, & Test Preparation” category with several other players - including those from/already operating in Indonesia such as Ruangguru, Pahamify, and CoLearn.

Since 2012, various types of edtech services have slowly but surely continued to emerge in Indonesia. Referring to the report above, there are dozens of local edtech startups that still running - in fact, each held a different value proposition. The market share is quite substantial, as for players like Zenius or Ruangguru that focused on K-12 students (elementary-high school level), there are more than 50 million students each year throughout Indonesia.

This opportunity has made several foreign players lining up to enter the Indonesian market. As of 2020, at least 6 foreign players have succeeded in planting a business in Indonesia - including having representative offices and local teams.

The local edtech market continues to grow, not only serving students, various edtech startups are starting to target professionals and business customers. Recently, there as been some new models, one of which is related to fintech which focuses on education loans.

– Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian