Hillhouse Capital’s GL Ventures leads $265m round in Chinese edtech startup

Beijing-based edtech firm EEO Education, the owner of teaching platform ClassIn, has closed a US$265 million series C round led by GL Ventures, Hillhouse Capital’s early-stage VC arm, the company posted on its official WeChat account on Friday.

Photo credit: EEO Education

Other investors include Tencent, Susquehanna International Group, Gaocheng Capital, and INCE Capital.

This round comes less than half a year after the company closed its series B in July this year, collecting “several tens of million of dollars” from sole investor INCE Capital.

The short period between these two rounds could indicate the company’s popularity among investors, while also signaling a cash-burning expansion strategy, a venture capital investor told KrAsia on Friday on the condition of anonymity.

Founded in 2014, EEO launched its first online classroom software, ClassIn, about one year later. The software first targeted after-class tutoring companies such as New Oriental and TAL Education. But it has also made its way to universities including Peking University and Tsinghua University, as well as public schools such as Beijing 101 Middle School and Shanghai Foreign Language School, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced teachers to go online.

The company also unveiled a new version of its platform called ClassIn X in July to allow teachers to merge their in-classroom teaching and online work, including class preparation, Q&A, and homework assignments, among other things.

“Software-as-a-service and education have been two sectors Tencent pays close attention to for long, and EEO happens to be in the conjunction,” Yao Leiwen, managing director of Tencent Investment, said on a WeChat post, adding that products like ClassIn will very likely become a necessity in the educational sector.

By the end of August this year, ClassIn claims to have had 60,000 schools and institutional clients from 35 countries and regions around the world, serving 20 million individuals from about 150 countries each month.

This report was first published on KrAsia.