Yellow Class, an online ed-tech platform, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Elevation Capital with participation from existing investors India Quotient, Titan Capital and First Cheque. Other investors include Vidit Aatrey (Co-founder, Meesho), Alok Mittal (Founder, Indifi), Vivekananda Hallekere (Co-founder, Bounce), Maninder Gulati (Global CSO, OYO) Abhinav Sinha (COO, OYO), Dhruv Agarwala (CEO, PropTiger) and Alvin Tse (Country Director, Xiaomi Indonesia ).
The company will use the funds for improving the product experience (for both parents and children), developing more holistic content, building brand awareness, hiring for leadership roles across the product, technology and engineering verticals, and driving expansion in over 500 cities in India and international markets, it said in a press statement. In November 2020, it had raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by India Quotient.
Founded in June 2020 by Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal, Yellow Class is a destination for free extracurricular and co-curricular classes, merging fun and learning for children in the 3-12 years’ age group, across over 40 categories like art, craft, dance, yoga, general knowledge, logical reasoning to name a few. Anshul and Arpit launched the company with the objective of improving accessibility to a variety of extracurricular classes for budding young learners. The platform’s online mode ensures it is easily accessible to children from their homes.
Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal, Co-founders, Yellow Class, in a joint statement said, ”Studies have shown that more than 100 million Indian kids below 13 years of age spend an average of 100 hours per month on YouTube and other similar platforms. Parents are actively looking for better, interactive alternatives that would be beneficial for their child’s cognitive growth. With Yellow Class, we are creating a new category in the ed-tech space. We aim to serve 10 million monthly active users on YellowClass platform in a year from now. We are actively looking for top talent who can lead the growth of YellowClass to serve this large market.”
The extracurricular segment in India has grown steadily in recent years, and is expected to reach a size of $5.8 billion in 2021. Today, this is a fragmented market mostly catered to by smaller localized players without any standardization in quality. Since most school curriculum and infrastructure do not focus enough on holistic child development, parents are keen on finding alternative and easily accessible options (preferably online) to encourage hobbies and other activities among their children. Travelling long distances for a class is a major inconvenience too and limits the options as parents need to manage their work/home lives and time. The long hours of commute also restrict the number of activities children can explore.
Commenting on the funding, Deepak Gaur, Partner, Elevation Capital, said, “Given the increasing importance of holistic development, extracurricular learning represents one of the fastest growing sectors in ed-tech.”
