Amid the ongoing funding winter in the Indian start-up ecosystem, edtech Uolo has raised $22.5 million in a Series A funding round led by the UAE-based venture capital fund Winter Capital. The investment session saw the participation of its existing investor Blume Ventures and another Dubai-based fund Morphosis Venture Capital.
This is the first major fundraising by the company in the past two years.
In 2020, Uolo secured $3 million (Rs 20 crore) in a pre-seed funding round led by Blume Ventures.
Prior to 2020, the company raised Rs 1.4 crore in seed funding in 2016. It also bagged $78,000 in funding in 2014, Inc42 reported.
Founded by Pallav Pandey, Ankur Pandey and Siddharth P Singh, Uolo offers learning programmes in coding and English speaking. Additionally, it develops online capabilities for over 8,500 partner schools in India. The company has reached out to over 3.7 million students in India.
“The edtech solutions need to build on top of 6 hours spent in school daily and magnify the outcomes by leveraging the smartphones available at home. The lack of alignment with school, together with exorbitant pricing is causing edtech companies to falter”, said Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo.
Commenting on the latest development, Anton Farlenkov, managing director of Winter Capital, added, “The first wave of edtech companies in India have proven consumer interest in online education. However, they lacked a cost-effective distribution. We believe that there will be a new generation of edtech companies capable of building organic, low-cost distribution, allowing students to study at $10 per year rather than $10 per hour.”
The edtech sector has been going through major upheavals this year. An Inc42 report pointed out that the companies from the sector raised $2.1 billion in funding compared to $4.73 billion in 2021.
Big players like Vedantu and Byju’s have been cutting down its workforce to combat dwindling revenue amidst the economic slowdown.