Indian online teaching platform Teachmint raises $16.5 million

Published May 4, 2021

An Indian startup that began its life after the global pandemic broke last year said on Tuesday it has concluded its third financing round as it enables hundreds of thousands of teachers in the world’s second-largest internet market to run classes online and serve their students.

Bangalore-based Teachmint said today it has raised $16.5 million in its Series A financing round. The round was led by Learn Capital, the San Francisco Bay Area-headquartered venture capital firm that focuses on edtech firms and has backed some of the world’s most promising online learning startups, including Coursera, Udemy, Nerdy, Minerva and Brainly.

CM Ventures, and existing investors Better Capital, which first invested in Teachmint before the startup had even registered itself, and Lightspeed India Partners also participated in the new round, which brings the Indian startup’s to-date raise to $20 million.

Teachmint helps teachers conduct classes online through an app on their Android smartphone, iPhone or the web. The startup has built an all-in-one product that allows teachers to kickstart a live class, do doubt-clearing sessions, take attendance, conduct webinars, collect fees, find new students, offer support via phone calls and take tests, among other tasks.

“When the pandemic broke, teachers were struggling with several tools including Google Meet, Zoom and even YouTube/Facebook Live to teach online. They were using additional tools like Google Forms for tests and WhatsApp for communication. It was a difficult and disconnected experience for most teachers as none of these tools were productised for teaching. That’s when we decided to build a mobile-first video-first solution specifically for teaching,” said Mihir Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Teachmint, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The product, available in 10 local languages, is highly localised for India-specific needs, said Gupta.

More than 700,000 teachers from over 1,500 cities and towns have signed up on the platform in less than 10 months since the launch of Teachmint’s product, said Gupta.

How is edtech spending its extra capital?

“From the Learn Capital team’s first meeting with Teachmint’s co-founders several months ago, it was clear that their collective team had meticulously architected an end-to-end, multi-modal, and best-in-class solution enabling teachers in India to instantly and seamlessly digitize their classrooms,” said Vinit Sukhija, partner at Learn Capital, in a statement.

“Now with over 700,000 teachers, Teachmint has become India’s leading online teaching platform,” he said, adding that Learn Capital believes that Teachmint can eventually expand its offering outside of India.

Gupta said Teachmint is currently not monetizing its product, and doesn’t intend to do so in the immediate future as it is currently prioritizing reaching more teachers in India and also expand its offerings.

He said most teachers have learnt about Teachmint through friends as it has limited investment in marketing. Teachmint is open to exploring any strategic acquisition opportunities with smaller startups, he said.

India’s first Earth-imaging satellite startup raises $5 million; first launch planned for later this year

Published August 19, 2020

Bengaluru-based Pixxel is getting ready to launch its first Earth imaging satellite later this year, with a scheduled mission aboard a Soyuz rocket. The roughly one-and-a-half-year-old company is moving quickly, and today it’s announcing a $5 million seed funding round to help it accelerate even more. The funding is led by Blume Ventures, Lightspeed India Partners, and growX ventures, while a number of angel investors participated.

This isn’t Pixxel’s first outside funding: It raised $700,000 in pre-seed money from Techstars and others last year. But this is significantly more capital to invest in the business, and the startup plans to use it to grow its team, and to continue to fund the development of its Earth observation constellation.

The goal is to fully deploy said constellation, which will be made up of 30 satellites, by 2022. Once all of the company’s small satellites are on orbit, the Pixxel network will be able to provide globe-spanning imaging capabilities on a daily basis. The startup claims that its technology will be able to provide data that’s much higher quality when compared to today’s existing Earth-imaging satellites, along with analysis driven by PIxxel’s own deep learning models, which are designed to help identify and even potentially predict large problems and phenomena that can have impact on a global scale.

Pixxel’s technology also relies on very small satellites (basically the size of a beer fridge) that nonetheless provide a very high-quality image at a cadence that even large imaging satellite networks that already exist would have trouble delivering. The startup’s founders, Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal, created the company while still in the process of finishing up the last year of their undergraduate studies. The founding team took part in Techstars’ Starburst Space Accelerator last year in LA.