In Vietnam, there is a huge education gap between the urban centers, which have access to more resources, and the small towns and rural areas, where 80% of the students live. Edupia, an online learning platform, bridges the gap with its live classes and private tutoring. The startup today announced that it has raised a $14 million Series A round led by Jungle Ventures with participation from eWTP Capital (a venture fund under Alibaba and Ant Financial) and ThinkZone Ventures. This brings Edupia’s total funding to $16 million.
Edupia currently has a total of 5 million users and 400,000 paying students. According to Tran Duc Hung, who founded the company in 2018 as an English self-learning platform, Edupia is on track to surpass its $100 million revenue goal in the next three years. Most of its users are in Vietnam, but Edupia is expanding to other Southeast Asian markets such as Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, and is adding more subjects, including math and coding.
Prior to founding Edupia, Hung spent 10 years as Director of Digital Services at Viettel, Vietnam’s largest telco. While there, he saw how digitization is changing many aspects of everyday life, including e-commerce, finance, healthcare and education. At the same time, Hung told TechCrunch, he also observed a gap between educational resources in large, wealthy cities, private language centers, and other areas of Vietnam, especially in English. Hung, whose family includes many teachers, saw an opportunity to launch an online platform to make English education accessible to every K-12 student.
Edupia founder Tran Duc Hung standing at the desk Image Credits: Edupia
As Edupia’s self-learning business grew in popularity, the team saw a need for more ways to interact with students and launched live classes in March 2021. Hung said Edupia runs both business models simultaneously, with self-learning serving as the first link. Score for users before they upgrade to class and lesson.
Parents and students find Edupia through a variety of channels, including online marketing campaigns, school partnerships, word-of-mouth referrals and key opinion leader (KOL) marketing. Edupia reaches all provinces through a national sales team, and was also the first company in the market to create thousands of micro-KOLs (influencers) in various industries.
While there are many English-learning apps, Hung said Edupia does not compete directly with them because it wants to give students the same experience as offline learning centers, with teachers who assign homework, assess student progress and organize online activities to increase engagement. . Edupia’s closest competitors are offline learning centers, but unlike brick-and-mortar schools, it has quickly scaled in Vietnam’s 64 provinces. Each 60 students are assigned to a learning group and each teacher can manage up to 2,000 students across the country.
Edupia’s new capital will be used in part to upgrade its consolidation platform. The company plans to hire for C-level positions and senior managers at scale and to increase its international expansion.
