There’s a big training 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 right this moment it has raised a $14 million Sequence A led by Jungle Ventures with participation from eWTP Capital (a enterprise fund underneath Alibaba and Ant Monetary) and ThinkZone Ventures. This brings Edupia’s complete funding to $16 million.
Edupia presently 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, mentioned 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 also 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 most important telco in Vietnam. Whereas there, he noticed how digitization was remodeling many elements of day by day life, together with e-commerce, finance, healthcare and training. On the identical time, Hung tells DailyTech, he additionally noticed the hole between the academic sources out there in bigger, wealthier cities, like non-public language facilities, and different areas of Vietnam, particularly in English. Hung, whose household consists of many lecturers, noticed a chance to launch a web-based platform to make English training accessible to each Okay-12 scholar.
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 interact with college students and began dwell courses in March 2021. Hung mentioned Edupia will run each enterprise fashions on the identical time, with self-learning serving as the primary contact level for customers earlier than they improve to courses and tutoring.
Mother and father and college students discover Edupia by means 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 means of its nationwide gross sales crew, and it was additionally the primary firm out there to create a community of hundreds of micro-KOLs (aka influencers) in several industries.
Whereas there are numerous English-learning apps out there, Hung mentioned Edupia doesn’t compete straight with them as a result of it seeks to offer 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 not like 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 will probably 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 enlargement.