Edtech Startup FlipClass Raises $1Mn In Funding From S Chand & Blume Venture

Bangalore based home and online tutoring startup FlipClass has raised $1 million in funding from education content and services provider S Chand and Company Private Limited (S Chand) along with Blume Ventures.

Founded in 2014 by Vineet Dwivedi, an IIT Kanpur graduate, FlipClass is a technology platform that connects tutors and students to provide effective home, online and mobile tutoring solutions. It also has an inbuilt assessment tool to gauge student learning and provide key inputs that help improve performance. The platform recently launched a doubt clearing mobile app FlipTutor, which uses Whatsapp like interface to provide answers in real-time. The company is seed funded by LetsVenture and angel investors.

“FlipClass has an active database of 4,000 students and 10,000 tutors and has delivered over 200,000 hours of home and online tuitions. We are very excited to have S Chand invest in our platform. We will also look to integrate their content with our learning tools and provide a more enriching experience to students.”, said Vineet Dwivedi, Founder and CEO, FlipClass.

“S. Chand aspires to lead the knowledge ecosystem and support management teams building disruptive technologies in the educational services and content space. Investing in FlipClass is a step in this direction.”, said Mr. Gaurav Jhunjhnuwala, Director, S. Chand.

“At Blume, we are core believers of edtech and its ongoing relevance for years to come. Even with the advent of online solutions, home tuition and tutors continues to be a huge market with innate problems of discovery and selection. This is where we believe FlipClass will play a significant role by aggregating tutors and parents onto a single platform. Equipped with unique tech tools that help parents assess their child's progress, FlipClass has a high engagement and retention rate,” said Karthik Reddy of Blume Venture Advisors.

The S. Chand Group has been investing in the fast growing edtech space, having completed five transactions since 2014 and created a presence in smart class solutions, tablet-based content delivery, STEM based activity kits, home tutoring and online test preparation. The company managed by Dinesh Jhunjhnuwala (Vice Chairman) and Himanshu Gupta (Joint Managing Director) is content and service provider in the Indian education sector, publishing around 35 million textbooks and providing smart class and tablet solutions to schools.

FlipClass is the market leader in providing good quality learning through its online and home tuition services. In the thriving private tuition industry in India, FlipClass differentiates itself by providing qualified and passionate teachers to students through a stringent tutor qualifying process along with powerful technology platform using big data analytics.

FlipClass - An Online Marketplace for Home Tutors

With the envision of providing school education at your doorstep and planning on expanding in 50 cities over next 5 years, FlipClass comes up with this culture we all probably have been aware of for a long time, but in a very different and a more student-friendly manner.

Founded by Vineet Dwivedi (CEO) in June 2013, FlipClass is a Bangalore based online marketplace for home tutors and unlike a traditional class, will get a teacher to a student's house for a personalised tuition delivery and a one to one experience for the student. Essentially, the company recruits and trains tutors who enable home tuition that are student centric on one hand and cater for tutors' time and place of convenience on the other. This platform has been designed to address the immediate need to increase the visibility of qualified affordable tutors to parents for their children. Also, delivery of quality tuitions and the assimilation of learning is enhanced exponentially by the learning platform Relemo, which emphasises on' Read less, learn more'.

In August this year, FlipClass raised funding of Rs.1.5 crore (under $250,000) from LetsVenture, an online fundraising platform.

[caption id="attachment_94763" align="alignleft" width="341"] Vineet Dwivedi (Founder & CEO, Flipclass)[/caption]With a team of 30 enthusiastic and self-motivated people, located out of Bangalore, these guys have been moving fast ahead with the aim of bridging the gap between classroom learning and what has been left out by the school teacher as part of self-learning / own time education. The technology that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning brings together the one-on-one home tuition setting and adaptive learning platform to bridge the gap.

"Several efficient time utilisation methods have been incorporated by our team in our daily practice such as telescoping the total time of deployment of tutors by finding, recruiting, training, and allotting them for tuition via our platform or efficiently mapping teachers' skill sets to the requirements of the students looking for home-tuitions.", says Digvijay Dey, who is the marketing manager at this start-up which has been funded by a group of Angels and is looking for some strong partners to move at a brisk pace in this ever growing market.

The main advantage Digvijay think Flipclass has over their competitors is the ability to truly bridge the learning gap by filtering capable teachers and by utilizing their Relemo adaptive learning platform. The other advantage is the ability to bring in efficiency to operations through the cutting edge CRM.

On asking how the experiences were in the early part of their journey till people got familiar with their website, Digvijay says, “During the first month, one of our founders actually tested the home-tuition waters by volunteering to deliver tuition at the students' homes. During the first 3 months, we had to wait patiently at both ends of the chain: supply side, for home tutors; demand side, for students. But we did not dither.” Perhaps, it was this self-belief that got them up and running.

With a message for young and future entrepreneurs of focussing more on the marketing plan than the product, they are set to provide affordable, reliable and personalized tutoring for your child, at the comfort of your home.

FlipClass raises funding via crowdfunding portal LetsVenture

FlipClass, which is an online portal that helps parents and guardians looking for private coaching for their children by connecting them to tutors, has been successful in raising seed funding on LetsVenture, which is a deal making site.

The Bangalore based startup has raised Rs.1.5 crore this week from a cluster of investors which was led by Hareesh Ramanna, who is the founder of BlueCap MobileHoldings, which is a Singapore based Company.

FlipClass was founded by Vineet Dwivedi, who is an IIT Kanpur graduate, in May 2013. The idea came to him when he was trying hard to find a home tutor for his 11 year old son but his hard work yielded him with no successful results.

FlipClass currently offers services only in Bangalore and Hyderabad. The online portal helps parents in finding tested and pre-screened tutors for their children and even provides them with the facility of paying their fees online. The startup retains about 20 to 30 % of the fees with itself as commission and passes on the rest to the concerned tutors.

According to Vineet, the company pre-screens all the tutors in their network and even tests them for their skills. The company currently aims to expand the marketplace to the top 50 cities of the country. The company's database contains experienced people from BITS, IITs, IIMs, Stanford and other prestigious institutes from all around the globe. The tutors are also judged on their passion in teaching others.

The Company has a goal to earn revenue of more than $150 million in the next 5 years and is working hard to achieve this goal. The startup currently has around 1000 tutors and 500 students in its network in Bangalore.
According to Hareesh Ramanna, who lead the 1.5 crore deal, the money can be used by the startup to expand to at least one more city and after this they will have to raise a larger round. He further added that the startup has a great potential to expand globally as it is a challenge to find a good tutor in Asian markets of China and Korea as well.