Rockit Online secures $500K funding to tackle Vietnam’s education market

Rockit, an online education startup you’ve likely never heard of, just secured a US$500 thousand investment from three investors in the Silicon Valley.

Rockit is a live online education company that focuses on teaching students courses in math, science, english and test preparation (IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC). It aims to connect young middle and high school students with teachers (Rockit currently employs 50) who work with students in class sizes no more than five people at once.

According to an official statement, although Rockit is starting in Vietnam, it plans to expand throughout Southeast Asia in the near future. This is likely of interest to Rockit’s three Valley investors: Learn Capital, John Katzman, and Formation 8. Learn Capital, specifically, has a $100 million fund dedicated to investing in education startups across the world and is keen to focus more on Southeast Asia.

Rockit’s founders are a mix of Vietnamese and American folks, which might give the startup a possible edge on local Vietnamese counterparts. No doubt the Valley investment also lends new perspectives to the team.

In Vietnam, there are only a few education online startups. These include DeltaViet, which has cloned Udemy (a Silicon Valley skills learning platform) for the Vietnamese market, and Topica, which hosts over one thousand teachers on its online certification programs. Zuni, LeeRit, HocMoi, GiapSchool and more are also among the many startups trying to crack Vietnam’s education market, which is in desperate need of disruption. 40 percent of Vietnamese parents pay up to ten percent of their income on education. This is in a country which produces a scarce amount of Ph.D.’s and whose education system is struggling to serve a workforce that cannot keep up with the economy. Therefore, these startups address a problem that aims at a particularly systemic issue for Vietnam’s potential continued growth.

The funding round also indicates that Vietnam is still ripe for investment. Recently, startups like Syncrectics and Adatao also secured discrete funding.