Genius Teacher an ed-tech firm raised angel funding of $2 million from Freecharge founders, others

2024-04-19 07:18:00 Education

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Genius Learning Labs Pvt. Ltd, which operates quiz-based education-technology firm Genius Teacher, has raised $2 million (Rs 14.67 crore at current exchange rates) in angel funding from a clutch of high-profile investors.

Participants in the round include Cred founder Kunal Shah, Freecharge co-founder Sandeep Tandon, WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose and Proptiger CEO Dhruv Agarwal. Before launching Cred, Shah had co-founded Freecharge.

Myanmar-based MMOne Online?s CEO Justin Sway, Cvent executive Daniel Lapus, LetsVenture president Nimish Kampani, former Snapdeal vice-president Gaurav Gupta, former AWS India managing director Bikram Bedi, and Fynd co-founder Farooq Adam also participated.

Whiteboard Capital and VKG Ventures LLP also invested in the startup, Mumbai-based Genius Teacher said in a statement.

The company, set up by Advitiya Sharma, says it offers personalised and interest-based learning content, with its artificial intelligence-based platform providing curriculum-specific and adaptive learning capabilities.It uses strong interests like food, movies, sports nature and more to make learning maths, science and English more enjoyable. It also provides scholarships and internships with organisations such as WhatsApp, Mahindra & Mahindra and Singapore University.

Sharma feels the current education startups offer very poor engagement for students. ?The answer is not to give child internet and expect them to learn. But to create an environment where learning happens naturally,? commented Sharma.

It will use the capital it has raised to enhance product development for teachers and grow its user base to over a million students in the next 12 months, Sharma said. The company has created over 5K quizzes on its platforms and nearly 10K interest-based personalised videos.The company also claims it has signed up more than 100 schools, 2,000 teachers and over 70,000 students on its platform.

Genius Teacher is among several early-stage ed-tech firms that have raised funding in the past few months, with companies in the space seeing huge traction from individual and institutional investors.

Genius competes with Vidyanext (run by Pengala Learning Pvt. Ltd), flipClass (run by Gyankosh Solutions Pvt. Ltd), and Tiger Global-backed Vedantu Innovations Pvt. Ltd, which all try to serve the needs of home tutors with some technology.

?I believe that for something of massive scale to be built in ed-tech, having an online-only offering is of paramount importance. The minute you get tempted by offline offerings, what you?re doing is limiting your possibility of scale in the long run," said Kunal Walia, managing partner, Khetal Advisors, a Bengaluru-based investment bank that has worked with multiple education start-ups.