Toppr bags $10 million to help its students top entrance exams in India

India has the highest number of students in the world. Over 253 million students are enrolled in schools across the country. Yet when it comes to e-learning, the present offerings in the country leave a lot to be desired. And classic classroom education is expensive.

Toppr wants to change that. It provides a subject learning platform for middle school and high school students preparing for the entrance examination for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and medical entrance exams. Today, it has announced a series B funding round of US$10 million led by Fidelity Growth Partners India. Its existing investors SAIF Partners and Helion Ventures, who had earlier invested US$2 million in Toppr, participated in the round.

“K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) education is a large space but served by individual teachers. That is a hard model to scale and one needs a player who can democratize education in this country,” says Rahul Chowdhri of Helion Ventures.

“Most of the students will have access to a mobile phone or computer. This presents us a huge opportunity to change how we learn using technology. We want to make subject learning personal, efficient, and affordable,” says Zishaan Hayath, CEO and co-founder of Toppr.

The startup takes an analytical, goal-driven approach to optimize self-study time. It claims to have 170,000 students on its platform who practiced over 2.5 million questions in the month of April. With fresh funding, it expects to reach 5 million students in three years.

“We aim to expand the scope of our product, invest more in technology and build deeper content. We will be catering to V to XII standards in the K-12 segment.” says Hayath.

Toppr’s fee starts at INR 2,900 (US$45.4).

According to the company, the entrance exam preparation market for K-12 students is valued at US$8 billion and growing 20 percent every year.

The startup had recently acquired its rival EasyPrep, a customized exam paper creation platform for schools, coaching institutes, and teachers.

Another firm in the space serving the same segment is Embibe, backed by Kalari Capital and Lightbox Ventures.