Mumbai-based $100-million venture capital fund, Tomorrow Capital, led the Rs 47 Crore Series A investment round in Leverage Ed-tech Private Limited.
Leverage Edu is a startup that works to empower students across India to find and access the best-matched higher education options globally, and caters to the width of their needs. This is the fund’s second edtech investment in the last two months, based on their thesis of building large consumer brands in the education space.
Tomorrow Capital CEO Rohini Prakash said, “We have always looked at the education space as one where large home-grown consumer brands will drive the market for the long term. We have been studying the space for a while now and identified higher education and co-curricular support for K-12 as areas which present an opportunity to build highly scalable brands.”
“The pandemic-led, school-from-home situation has had a deep impact on the conventional brick and mortar forms of businesses and has enhanced the digital distribution and adoption of these services, which is a big enabler for scale,” Prakash added.
This second investment from Tomorrow Capital in Edtech comes in quick succession after the fund’s $2 million investment in BeyondSkool, a live, online co-curricular upskilling academy for kids that provides a global curriculum-based learning outcome irrespective of the school that the students attend.
Tomorrow Capital is a $100 million early-stage investment fund focused on building India’s next big consumer brands by providing more than just capital. Tomorrow Capital provides access to blue-chip talent, industry networks, and resources for growth which enables entrepreneurs to drive the next wave of growth.
Tomorrow Capital is backed by Abhinandan Lodha, who is also part of the fund’s Investment Committee.
“We have been on the lookout for disruptive models in edtech inspiring ‘real’ education over traditional rote-learning systems. BeyondSkool is in an excellent position to inspire an overhaul of the same by making kids logically sound problem solvers through applied forms of knowledge, all digitally enabled,” Prakash added.
Including the current investment, Tomorrow Capital has invested nearly Rs 100 crore over the last three years in five early-stage startups. The other investments are in Bonito Designs, a design-centric, tech enabled home interior design and execution firm, and Multiliving Technologies, a home management platform that uses both human and artificial intelligence providing home-user services of managed assets, managed rental and managed lifestyle.
Tomorrow Capital recently exited from ZenoHealth (previously Generico) – a pharmacy chain selling low-cost generic drugs, at an over 7x return in just 2 years.
Tomorrow Capital has set aside another Rs 200 crore for a fresh round of investments over the next 12 months and is in the process of identifying new opportunities.
