Vietnamese edtech startup bags pre-series A funding to grow self-learning platform

Edmicro, an edtech startup based in Hanoi, has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-series A funding round led by Insignia Ventures Partners.

Edmicro provides a personalized learning assessment platform for K-12 students called Onluyen, which roughly translates to self-learning in Vietnamese.

Photo credit: Wokandapix

With the funding, it looks to strengthen the capabilities of its platform, grow its user base in Vietnam, and expand into other markets in Southeast Asia by 2021. The startup said it’s seeking industry partners across the region to achieve this goal.

“The gaps we see in Vietnam resonate across education systems in the region in varying degrees,” the startup said in a statement.

Edmicro was started in 2018 by IT expert Nguyen Ngoc Que, former Intel Vietnam manager Dang Bao Linh, education sales veteran Nguyen Quy Tien, and Pham Giang Linh, CEO of online course provider Hocmai. The team leverages over 30 years of experience in providing education and technology services in the country.

The startup aligns its educational content with curriculum standard, areas where Quy Tien and Giang Linh excel in. On the tech side of things, machine learning specialists like Ngoc Que and Bao Linh develop the technology to handle personalization for a large number of users.

Since its inception, Edmicro has been focusing on creating a smart self-learning product catered to Vietnamese students. According to the company, self-learning and assessment remain a pain point in the education system of Vietnam, which is home to roughly 17 million students. This results in lost opportunities for students to understand their strengths and improve on their weaknesses.

To tackle the problem, Edmicro has developed an adaptive and individualized learning and assessment platform designed to be a companion for K-12 students. With Onluyen, students are given automatically generated resources aligned to their learning objectives or competencies.

The platform can also adapt to the learning profile and knowledge gaps of every user through the use of machine learning. With this, teachers and parents can learn more about the students’ capabilities through generated competency maps and reports.

In the future, it looks to add deeper integration of school activities into its platform to increase its user base and engagement. For example, teachers will be able to assign homework and give out exams and lessons through Onluyen.

During Edmicro’s prototyping stage, it built a product around the thinking that Vietnamese students are more likely to improve when they plan their own development. What they found was that although the students study hard, they still depend more on instructions and feedback from their teachers and parents.

“We did try to teach several students planning skills, but the process was far too complicated and costly to scale up,” the startup said.

Gathering what they learned, the Edmicro team designed Onluyen to become an “integral element in the education ecosystem,” rather than an individual learning tool.

Vietnam’s e-learning landscape