EdTech Startup Kidovators Closes Seed Funding of $180K to Scale Its Programs to Over 100K Students
Kidovators, India’s first 21st century skill learning platform of Bengaluru based ADD-on-GYAN Educational Services Pvt. Ltd., has today announced the closing of a seed round funding of $180,000 from impact investor Gray Matters Capital under its edLABS initiative.
M Chandrasekaran, Board Member at Sylvant Advisors and former Corporate Advisor to the Manipal Group, also participated in this funding round.
The funds will be utilized to scale the Kidovators programs to over 100,000 students and 600+ partner schools in 2018 as well as strengthen the core content, technology and sales team. The 21st century online skill learning platform, with courses on creative thinking, critical thinking, complex problem solving and other 21st century competencies for students aged 8 – 15, has garnered over 10,000 student signups since its launch in the beginning of this year.
It has been conducting India’s Biggest ‘Creativity OlympiadTM’ to help students from Class 4 - 9 to hone their creative thinking skills.
edLABS, Gray Matters Capital’s early stage education and skilling sector focused innovation portfolio, provides very early stage funding to ‘visionary edu-preneurs’ to help build breakthrough solutions that address education gaps, 21st century skills and future of work for the Indian mass market.
The funding comes on the back of a new Learning Program & Olympiad on Critical Thinking launched by Kidovators this year to test skills like deduction, reasoning, interpretation, identification of assumptions, among others.
Another milestone of significance that Kidovators achieved in the last six months was its partnership with National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA), a body with 55,000 member schools, to conduct the National Analytical Aptitude Test (NAAT) in 2018. The NAAT assesses learning outcomes amongst students of class 3 to 11 from budget private schools on the most critical 21st century skills i.e. creative and critical thinking.
Commenting on the fundraise, Priyadeep Sinha, Founder & CEO - Kidovators said, “We have been constantly working to empower school going students with skills that would prepare them for a thriving future that will be dominated by automation and artificial intelligence. With our flagship programs on creative and critical thinking, we have pioneered 21st century competencies education for K-12 students. Our constant effort is to provide the most relevant education to them.”
Ragini Bajaj Chaudhary, India CEO - Gray Matters Capital underscored the importance of learning and teaching 21st century skills by saying, “The workplace of today needs a workforce equipped with skills to collaborate, articulate ideas, analyze and decipher insights from a sea of information and solve problems through creative thinking and critical reasoning. The big challenge in front of us is knowing how to support and teach these skills to students in schools. Kidovators is one of those innovative enterprises in the India’s education sector which we foresee will create a huge impact in building the human capital India needs for the future by successfully overcoming this challenge head-on.”
Founded in 2011, Kidovators had earlier raised angel funding from Luis Miranda, Former Chairman, IDFC PE and M Chandrasekaran in 2015.
Gray Matters Capital is also the anchor investor in CBA Capital’s $20 million education sector focused fund – Education Catalyst Fund which has invested in edtech startups such as Buddy4Study, Simulanis and Kopykitab.
Just today, edtech unicorn Byju’s has acquired a Bengaluru-based maths learning startup, Math Adventures for an undisclosed amount. This is fourth acquisition by Byju’s so far. Last year, it acquired two companies from Pearson, TutorVista and Edurite in July 2017 as well as student assessment platform Vidyartha in January 2017.
