Exclusive: Indonesia’s CoLearn bags more funding to wrap up $27m series A

Now that schools in Indonesia are reopening their doors, the country’s edtech players will be keeping a close eye on how it will affect user retention on their platforms.

However, homegrown edtech company CoLearn, as well as its investors, seem to be as bullish as ever.

The company has raised an extension series A round worth US$17 million, almost doubling the US$10 million it raised in its initial series A funding round in April 2021.

Speaking exclusively to Tech in Asia, CoLearn co-founder and CEO Abhay Saboo says the round was closed late last year, with backing from new investors including Korean firm KTB Network and Indonesian higher education institution Bina Nusantara University.

CoLearn co-founder and CEO Abhay Saboo / Photo credit: CoLearn

Existing investors including Sequoia Capital’s Surge, AC Ventures, GSV Ventures, TNB Aura, S7V and January Capital also participated in the new round.

At the start of the pandemic, edtech adoption in Southeast Asia’s largest market jumped threefold from 6 million users in January to August 2019 to 20 million users the following year, according to a study conducted by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company. But the recent investment serves as a validation of CoLearn’s view on the future of education in post-pandemic Indonesia.

“Parents will realize the best combination [for their children’s education] is offline school and online private tutoring. School going back offline will be a positive thing for this industry,” Saboo says.

Latecomer’s advantage

Saboo co-founded CoLearn with Marc Irawan and Sandeep Devaram in 2020, but the firm’s journey began even before then.

In 2018, the company initially started with an offline model, establishing itself as a “smart center” that hired top educators to offer supplementary English, mathematics, and coding classes to students.

These centers proved to be successful and became profitable quickly, says Saboo, but scaling such a brick-and-mortar business was a challenge. Going hybrid was one option, but when Covid-19 hit, the decision became an easy one: The company went fully online.

The next big decision for the firm would be related to its product offering.

CoLearn co-founders Irawan, Devaram, and Saboo / Photo credit: CoLearn

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