The funding is Series A and led by Elevation Capital
The company plans to use the funds for product development, content creation, brand marketing, leadership hiring, and strategic expansion in select geographies.
Bengaluru, NFAPost: 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. In November 2020, it had raised $1.5 Mn in a seed round led by India Quotient.
Founded in June 2020 by Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal, Yellow Class is India’s largest 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 Gupta and Arpit Mittal 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.
These classes are taught by accomplished mentors, including influencers, professionals, even celebrities, who are onboarded after a stringent selection process. Each class is attended by as many as 10,000 children simultaneously, where the AI gamification layer keeps them engaged through an interactive chatbot along with digital activities such as polls and quizzes. Since its inception, more than 1 million children have been engaged in over 150 million minutes of learning and classes (collectively).
Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal, Co-founders, Yellow Class, in a joint statement said in the last 10 years, there has been an exponential rise in the time spent by children passively consuming online content—which is extremely harmful to their growth.
“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,” said Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal.
With Yellow Class, the founders said the company is creating a new category in the ed-tech space. “Easy to access, fun, interactive classes that kids love. Now children can spend their time in active learning and hone new skills. 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,” said Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal.
The extracurricular segment in India has grown steadily in recent years, and is expected to reach a size of $5.8 Bn[1] 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.
Further, as screen time continues to rise among Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha children, parents are amenable to replacing the time spent on videos online with more productive and educational content. Yellow Class addresses these pain points of access to quality extracurricular education in various categories, through its superior online format, while remaining cost-effective and scalable.
Through strong word of mouth, the company has grown 18X in the last six months and plans to work towards experimenting with new categories of extra/co-curricular classes, such as musical instruments and sports. They are also enhancing user value by offering classes in vernacular languages, driving social peer-to-peer engagement and ensuring deeper progress tracking to become the largest global early-learning community for children.
Commenting on the funding, Elevation Capital Partner Deepak Gaur said given the increasing importance of holistic development, extracurricular learning represents one of the fastest growing sectors in ed-tech.
“Yellow Class offers the widest range of extracurricular activities for children through live-streamed classes with a gamified AI layer that builds interactivity and engagement. Anshul and Arpit’s journey as they built and scaled the platform in a matter of six months is truly an inspiration,” said Deppak Gaur.
About Elevation Capital
Elevation Capital is a leading venture capital firm which provides seed and early stage capital for emerging companies in India. Founded in 2002, Elevation is currently investing out of its seventh fund, and has over $2 billion under management. The fund is led by Managing Partner Ravi Adusumalli, along with five Partners Deepak Gaur, Mukul Arora, Mridul Arora, Vivek Mathur and Mayank Khanduja.
The firm has a portfolio of over 100 companies across the internet, SaaS, consumer, financial services and logistics sectors. Elevation has been an early investor and partner to founders of category defining companies such as Acko, FirstCry, Justdial, Makemytrip, Meesho, NoBroker, Paytm, ShareChat, Swiggy, Unacademy and Urban Company, among several others.
