US education startup GotIt!, which has set up operations in Vietnam, announced that it has raised over $9 million in seed and series A funding to help it build on its on demand platform for knowledge.
The series A round was for the startup – which has a Vietnamese co-founder Hung Tran – was led by Dipender Saluja, managing director of Capricorn Investment Group, the backer of breakthrough ideas like Tesla Motors, QuantumScape and Planet Labs. Meanwhile, Brad Bao, who was formerly responsible for Chinese investment firm Tencent’s US operation, led the seed round on behalf of Fosun Group.
“Capricorn’s DNA is our kind of DNA: breakthrough impact, innovative technology, and of course, marketplaces,” GotIt co-founder Peter Relan wrote in a Medium post.
GotIt was incubated by Relan’s Youweb Inc, which provided the education startup with $120,000 as per the incubation programme. Relan was asked to be a co-founder and executive chairman.
GotIt is a marketplace for interactive learning through an instant 10 minute chat or messaging session with an expert.
One of the top 10 education app on Appstore, is targets teenagers, who often get stuck with “late nights, procrastination and deadlines”. Thus, instead of consuming time googling or trying to find the “go-to” student, teenage learners will be matched with experts who will be fired if they just provide answers without explanation, or provide wrong explanation.
Hung Tran estimated the size of this teenager segment of the education market at 15 million users in the US and 30 million users in Europe, the targeted markets of the app.
GotIt has set up an office in Vietnam in a bid to hire local talented engineers, making sure the operation runs 24/24, according to the Vietnamese founder.
The startup is continuing hiring teams for its expansion, partly in order to realize its goal for the next year of combining artificial intelligence bots with its knowledge base and experts.
“Interaction in general, is an innate need – the explosion of messaging platforms proves this. Seems obvious in retrospect, that learning too needs to be short burst, interactive, on-demand,” Relan wrote.
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