There’s a massive schooling hole in Vietnam between city facilities, which have entry to extra sources, and the smaller cities and rural areas the place 80% of scholars dwell. Edupia, a web based studying platform, is bridging that divide with its dwell courses and personal tutoring. The startup introduced at this time it has raised a $14 million Sequence A led by Jungle Ventures with participation from eWTP Capital (a enterprise fund beneath Alibaba and Ant Monetary) and ThinkZone Ventures. This brings Edupia’s complete funding to $16 million.
Edupia at present has a complete of 5 million customers, with 400,000 paying college students. Tran Duc Hung, who based the corporate in 2018 as an English self-learning platform, stated Edupia is on observe to exceed its $100 million income goal within the subsequent three years. Most of its customers are in Vietnam, however Edupia can be increasing into different Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, and including extra topics, together with math and coding
Earlier than founding Edupia, Hung spent 10 years as director of digital companies at Viettel, the biggest telco in Vietnam. Whereas there, he noticed how digitization was remodeling many points of each day life, together with e-commerce, finance, healthcare and schooling. On the similar time, Hung tells TechCrunch, he additionally noticed the hole between the academic sources obtainable in bigger, wealthier cities, like non-public language facilities, and different areas of Vietnam, particularly in English. Hung, whose household contains many lecturers, noticed a possibility to launch a web based platform to make English schooling accessible to each Ok-12 pupil.
Edupia founder Tran Duc Hung standing towards a desk Picture Credit: Edupia
As Edupia’s self-learning enterprise gained traction, the crew noticed demand for extra methods to have interaction with college students and began dwell courses in March 2021. Hung stated Edupia will run each enterprise fashions on the similar time, with self-learning serving as the primary contact level for customers earlier than they improve to courses and tutoring.
Dad and mom and college students discover Edupia by way of a number of channels, together with its on-line advertising campaigns, college partnerships, word-of-mouth referrals and key opinion chief (KOL) advertising. Edupia reaches all provinces by way of its nationwide gross sales crew, and it was additionally the primary firm available in the market to create a community of hundreds of micro-KOLs (aka influencers) in several industries.
Whereas there are a lot of English-learning apps obtainable, Hung stated Edupia doesn’t compete straight with them as a result of it seeks to present college students an identical expertise to offline studying facilities, with lecturers who assign homework, consider college students’ progress and set up on-line actions to extend engagement. Edupia’s closest rivals are subsequently offline studying facilities, however in contrast to brick-and-mortar faculties, it was capable of scale rapidly throughout Vietnam’s 64 provinces. Every 60 college students are assigned to a studying group, and every instructor can handle as much as 2,000 college students throughout the nation.
A part of Edupia’s new capital shall be used to improve its tutoring platform. The corporate additionally plans to rent for C-level positions and senior managers because it scales, and ramp up its worldwide growth.
