Yellow Class raises USD 6 mn funding from Elevation Capital, India Quotient and others

Edtech platform Yellow Class on Tuesday said it has raised USD 6 million (about Rs 44.5 crore) in a funding round led by Elevation Capital. The series A round also saw participation from existing investors – India Quotient, Titan Capital and First Cheque, a statement said.

Other investors include Vidit Aatrey (Meesho co-founder), Alok Mittal (Indifi founder), Vivekananda Hallekere (Bounce co-founder), Maninder Gulati and Abhinav Sinha (OYO executives), Dhruv Agarwala (PropTiger CEO) and Alvin Tse (Xiaomi Indonesia Country Director), it added.

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Yellow Class will use the funds for improving 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, the statement said. In November 2020, the company had raised USD 1.5 million in a seed funding round led by India Quotient.

Founded in June 2020, by Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal, Yellow Class is an online platform for extracurricular and co-curricular classes for children in the 3-12 years’ age group. Since its inception, more than 1 million children have been engaged in over 150 million minutes of learning and classes (collectively).

“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,” Yellow Class co-founder Anshul Gupta said.

Yellow Class co-founder Arpit Mittal added that parents are actively looking for better, interactive alternatives that would be beneficial for their child’s cognitive growth. “We aim to serve 10 million monthly active users on the Yellow Class platform in a year from now. We are actively looking for top talent who can lead the growth of Yellow Class to serve this large market, he added.

The edtech space has seen strong growth globally, including in India, with the COVID-19 pandemic serving as an inflection point. A number of offline classes went online to ensure continuity of education while adhering to social distancing norms. These companies have raised fresh funding from investors as well as acquired businesses, ushering in consolidation.

The extracurricular segment in India is expected to reach a size of USD 5.8 billion in 2021, Yellow Class said. 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. It is also offering classes in vernacular languages, driving social peer-to-peer engagement and ensuring deeper progress tracking.