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  • Vietnam edtech startup receives $15M investment

    Vietnam edtech startup receives $15M investment

    MindX, a startup that offers training in technology and programming, has received a US$15 million investment from a group of international funds in the Series B round.

    The funding round was led by Singaporean fund Kaizenvest, which has invested in many famous startups in the field of education technology (edtech), including unicorns Byju’s and upGrad in India, and Yola English Center in Vietnam.

    The other participating investors are Thai education group Aksorn, Japanese human resources group Mynavi, and venture capital funds like Wavemaker Partners and Beacon Fund.

    MindX, founded in 2015 in Hanoi, specializes in technology training for people of various age groups. It has centers in many cities, and also provides training online.

    In November 2021 it had raised $3 million in a Series A round.

    Sandeep Aneja, the founder of Kaizenvest, said the demand for learning technology in Vietnam and Southeast Asia is increasing.

    “This investment is commensurate with the market potential and our belief in today’s growing demand for technology learning.”

    Nguyen Thanh Tung, MindX’s co-founder, and CEO, said being equipped with skills and critical thinking to apply new tools and technologies is the way for Vietnam to have a pioneering generation of innovation, considering how technology is constantly evolving today.

    With the new funding, the company plans to expand its scale and portfolio of products and services and optimize the user experience and data systems.

    MindX is also partnering with more than 200 firms in countries like Singapore, Australia, and Thailand, allowing the world to access Vietnam’s highly skilled digital workforce.

    The $15 million represents one of the largest amounts raised by edtech in Vietnam this year.

    According to the e-Conomy report by Google and Bain&Company, investments for startup projects in Vietnam went down to $0.7 billion in the first half of 2022.

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  • Edtech startup CoderSchool bags $2.6M pre-seed fund

    Edtech startup CoderSchool bags $2.6M pre-seed fund

    CoderSchool, a Vietnam-based edtech startup offering online coding courses, has raised $2.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.

    Startup accelerator Iterative, investment network XA Network, and venture fund iSeed Ventures also took part in the funding round. CoderSchool plans to use the new capital to develop fresh educational content and build its technology infrastructure for technical training programs.

    Founded in 2015, the edtech startup offers courses in the fields of machine learning, data science, and web development to equip students with skills that can help them land jobs. The company automates much of the day-to-day teaching operations such as tracking student progress, grading, attendance, and personalization of courses.

    Simply put, CoderSchool provides programming courses for future engineers.

    “The need for good engineers and programmers in Southeast Asia has soared in a evolving technology and digital landscape,” said Michele Daoud, Monk’s Hill Ventures’ partner.

    According to CoderSchool, the number of students enrolling in the company’s online courses has surged every quarter since the beginning of 2020. CoderSchool has about 2,000 students and more than 80 percent of its full-time users have found jobs at big digital companies like MoMo, Tiki, Shopee, Microsoft, and FPT Software within six months after graduation.

    Alumni earn 30-40 percent higher than the average wage of inexperienced software engineers, according to the startup’s representatives.

    Currently, CoderSchool employs 15 instructional staff and plans to hire 35 employees more by Q4, 2022.

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  • Japanese edtech startup acquired by US startup amid online tutoring boom

    Japanese edtech startup acquired by US startup amid online tutoring boom

    American edtech startup EnglishCentral earlier this week announced the acquisition of a Japanese startup offering similar online tutoring for English learners. Langrich will be acquired in a share-swap agreement that sees the Tokyo-based startup’s investors – KLab Ventures and Hitomedia – become minority shareholders in EnglishCentral. According to a KLab spokesperson, it marks the first time that a Japanese startup has been acquired by a larger American one.

    Founded in 2010, Langrich uses English tutors in the Philippines to provide English instruction via Skype. Like its main competitors, Rarejob and DMM, lessons are one-on-one and focus on conversation skills. Langrich users will now benefit from a video lesson archive for web and mobile, as well as EnglishCentral’s speech recognition technology for studying vocabulary and pronunciation.

    “We will keep the Langrich brand as our consumer brand in Japan,” Alan Schwartz, EnglishCentral’s CEO. “EnglishCentral will remain the name of the company and the name of the platform that we provide to our global partners, including many leading online learning companies in Korea, China, and Brazil.”

    EnglishCentral, headquartered in Arlington, Massachusetts, boasts more than 100,000 paying users per month. The service is available in more than 100 countries and at over 400 universities across the globe. Perhaps EnglishCentral’s biggest differentiator in the crowded edtech space is its money-back guarantee – the startup refunds 100 percent of a student’s lesson fees if they don’t level up after three months.

    Schwartz says that EnglishCentral will retail all of Langrich’s current employees – a total of 260 including teachers. “We’re also adding dozens of teachers a month, and we will not limit teacher hiring to the Philippines going forward,” he adds.

    The Japanese juku – cram school – industry is valued at roughly US$10 billion. Eikaiwa – conversational English lessons – take a big chunk of that market. With strong internet infrastructure and a population that’s increasingly fond of smartphones, many of those lessons are moving online. That could hurt brick-and-mortar schools, which have already faltered, since online learning is more cost effective for learners. This shift to online has created, arguably, one of Japan’s hottest startup verticals.

    “After the Nova implosion (once Japan’s largest physical English conversation school, Nova went bankrupt in 2007), the whole market in Japan stalled, but things have changed in last several years,” Schwartz explains. “Rarejob is now public and you can see from their financials they are growing at close to 50 percent in terms of registered users. DMM we believe is growing even faster. They are the main competitors in the online market in Japan that have traction. We grew 90 percent last year in terms of revenue.”

    Further evidence of Japan’s online tutoring boom could be seen at Tech in Asia Tokyo’s Arena pitch battle last week, where domestic edtech startup Mana.bo took the grand prize.

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