Ex-Lazada exec’s edtech startup nets $23m series B

Manabie, an edtech startup based in Singapore, has raised around US$23 million in a series B round led by JIC Venture Growth Investments, the VC unit of sovereign wealth fund Japan Investment Corporation.

Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, real estate firm Hulic, and Zoshinkai Holdings – the parent firm of Japanese education company Z-kai – were among the investors that participated in the round. This brings Manabie’s total funding to around US$41.2 million to date.

Manabie team / Photo credit: Manabie

Manabie (Japanese for “to learn”) was founded in 2019 by Takuya Homma and former Lazada executive Christy Wong. The startup offers a learning management system and school administration system to over 30 education institutions in Japan, digitalizing payments, report cards, grades, and notifications to parents.

It also operates a cram school in Vietnam, offering online and offline classes, as well as tutoring, on subjects such as mathematics, English, and science. It currently has some 13,000 students.

Manabie has around 150 staff members in Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, and the Philippines.

The new funds will go towards expanding the firm’s product in Japan, entering new markets in Southeast Asia, and accelerating development of an AI tutor tool.

While Manabie initially operated offline learning centers, it eventually introduced software services. Today, its software-as-a-service business drives a majority of its revenue.

The startup plans to slowly phase out its B2C business in Vietnam to focus on B2B services. “Our longer-term vision is to be a product and service SaaS company,” Wong told Tech in Asia.

Manabie is targeting Southeast Asia’s fragmented education market, where many learning centers are run by small-business owners. Many of these are not on any software system; instead they use pen and paper and manage spreadsheets manually.

Manabie’s enterprise resource planning software allows these schools to “know which students are due for payments.” It also enables schools to upsell or cross-sell other products based on their students’ test scores, Wong explained.

The company is eyeing an expansion in the Philippines and the Middle East.

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Despite Japan’s shrinking population, there are still “1 million students in each grade,” Wong said. But a shortage of teaching staff is driving demand for learning management systems from providers like Manabie, she noted.