Mumbai-based startup HobSpace, which aims at enhancing extra-curricular activities for children, has raised around Rs 1 crore in Pre-Series A1 round by Inflection Point ventures, one of India’s largest angel investment platforms in India. HobSpace closed Rs 3.3 crore Seed round from Artha Ventures, Angel List and others in October 2020.
HobSpace intends to transform the under-utilised school buildings, playgrounds, clubhouses, and community centres into educational playgrounds and hobby centres with diverse after-school activities. The children have a plethora of options to choose from, including indoor as well outdoor activities. The company has students from India, UAE, Singapore and South Africa.
IPV Co-Founder Mitesh Shah said, “With education moving online, children are increasingly finding it hard to carve out their play time. Even parents are worried about it and HobSpace, which has a mix of offline and online activities for children, makes their model quite attractive to us. Given the pandemic, HobSpace still logged 33% growth in subscriber base m-o-m. We also liked their focus on unit economics and business viability.”
HobSpace Co-Founder Priyal Goel Sheth said, “IPV has provided us tremendous support since our first engagement. One thing that we always stress upon at HobSpace is having great partners who can guide and mentor us while we build and scale this exciting model.”
She added, “With the large investor network at IPV, we have been able to learn many things from a very diverse group. IPV team has spent a lot of time with us to deep dive on business metrics and achieving efficiencies.”
Co-founded in 2019 by Priyal Goel Sheth and Harsh Jain, HobSpace quickly capitalised on-time availability with kids and the changing needs of learning, both in India and internationally, during the lockdown.
The funds will be used to multiply its offline centres to reach out to the top towns over the next three years. Hobspace intends to have 20 centres in top 3 cities in the next 12 months, to start with. The education industry has over 350 million K-12 students in India, out of which 56 million kids reside in urban India. With Rs 1,000 billion Supplemental Education Market (growth rate of 8%), there is a large, fast growing, untapped market opportunity that HobSpace is addressing, the startup said.
