Seoul-based Edtech startup Mathpresso announced on June 29, 2021, that it had raised $50 million in a Series C funding round, which puts the company’s total funding at $105 million, according to CFO Soo Nahm.
The new Series C round was participated by GGV Capital, Yellowdog, Goodwater Capital, and KDB. In addition to the four new investors, previous backers, including SoftBank Ventures Asia, Legend Capital, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and Smilegate Investment, also participated in the round. This round marks GGV’s first investment in a Korea-based startup. With edtech as its key global investment thesis, GGV has backed a number of edtech companies like Zuoyebang.
Making learning Math easy with an app
Mathpresso was founded in 2015 by co-CEO Ray Lee and Jake Lee, and it operates QANDA, a K-12 mobile learning app. In 2017, QANDA adopted an AI-based optical character recognition(OCR) scan that searches for answers in 5 seconds. The service is now used by over 9.8 million users monthly from more than 50 different countries, a five times increase since 2020. Over 80% of QANDA’s users are now outside of Korea, with its strongest user bases including Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Mathpresso’s home ground has been long considered an educational mine as Korea has one of the highest household expenditures on education and one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Since the school lockdown in April 2020, online learning emerged as a new form of education, with the number of QANDA’s monthly active users surging by nearly five times.
New investment to strengthen business development
Applying Korea’s advanced learning content and after-school tutoring system to the global market, Mathpresso plans to develop a multi-faceted education platform with personalized content catered to each user’s learning level. A premium subscription model that offers micro-video lectures was launched in Korea in March 2021. Ray Lee describes the company’s mission as “segmenting and connecting all education content in the world” in order to build a highly personalized learning platform backed by seamless recommendation algorithms. The company also has ventured into offline and book publishing to optimize learning experiences both online and offline. QANDA Study Center Vietnam partners with teachers to match them with students and publishes and distributes quality workbooks, securing its presence as an all-in-one education hub.
With its Series C investment, Mathpresso plans to strengthen its AI-based techniques of recommendation algorithms and develop localized business models for its regional offices in Indonesia and Thailand. “Historically, quality education has been strictly available for the privileged few,” said Jake Lee, “Our mission is to break down the barriers to education through technology. In the future, we vision, anyone should and will be able to access quality education built just for them.”
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