Indian edtech firm Udayy raises $2.5m in seed round

Udayy, an India-based education tech platform, has raised US$2.5 million in a seed funding round led by Alpha Wave Incubation, a venture fund managed by Falcon Edge Capital and InfoEdge Ventures.

Udday co-founders (from left) Mahak Garg, Karan Varshney and Saumya Yadav/ Photo credit: Udayy

Better Capital, Kunal Shah, founder of Indian fintech Cred, and other angel investors also joined the round.

Udayy provides a platform that teaches mathematics and English to children between six to 11 years old through an interactive classroom with three to five children. The company runs over 400 classrooms every day and has also launched a free app that offers daily worksheets.

The edtech firm will use the capital for curriculum development and product suite expansion. It’s also looking to hire across the product, curriculum, and engineering teams.

“Primary grades are formative years of education for children. An outdated education system is failing Indian parents and children,” said Udayy’s CEO Saumya Yadav.

The startup claims that its business model has paved way for high contribution margins and a retention rate of over 97%.

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“After-school education in the younger age group segment is an untapped market in India,” said Anirudh Singh, managing director of Alpha Wave Incubation. He added that Udayy is on track to disrupt the space through its experiential learning model, which uses technology-powered gamification as a key driver of learning outcomes.

The edtech industry in India has clearly bucked the trend, receiving a total of US$2.22 billion in investments in 2020, according to a report from the Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association and PGA Lab. Research firm KPMG estimates that there are at least 3,500 edtech startups in the country today.