Creative Galileo, a Singapore-based EdTech startup focused on India, has raised $2.5 million in a seed funding round led by Kalaari Capital.
The funding round was also joined by Harish Bahl, Shashin Shah, Jinesh Patel, Atul Nishwar, Ashwin Puri, and Giridhar Malpani.
The company plans to use the fresh funds to hire more employees, produce more content, and build more partnerships with animation houses.
Creative Galileo is an e-learning app that brings together the best of education and entertainment to create personalized learning experiences for children between three to six years of age. The platform focuses on the six learning domains– numeracy, language, arts and aesthetics, social and emotional learning, motor skills, and discovery of the world through narrative videos, gamification, and personalized learning journeys.
Co-founded by Prerna Jhunjhunwala and Nikhil Naik in 2020, Creative Galileo’s vision is to provide high-quality content for learning while keeping the process fun. The company has also tied up with studios such as Big Animation, Periwinkle, Shemaroo, and Toonz Animation to enrich its offerings. Since its inception, the app has been downloaded over 4 million times and has gained 500,000 monthly active users, mostly from India. Around 10% of those downloads come from other markets such as Nepal, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, and the US.
In a shift from traditional teaching practices, the app teaches students through the characters of Little Singham, an Indian animated television series. It offers a range of research-based games and videos that are tailored to stimulate children’s brains, enabling them to be more responsive and helping them improve their reflexes. The app also focuses on inculcating values like friendship, kindness, helpfulness, and morality.
Last month, the startup also partnered with Amar Chitra Katha and got the rights to a wide range of characters to create games and videos for children.
Commenting on the investment, Vani Kola, Managing Director of Kalaari Capital, said,
“When we met Prerna and Nikhil, we truly saw them as shapers of a digital tomorrow, building the EdTech solutions for global learners of the future. We believe that technology in learning can bring unmatched access and affordability and improve literacy for a much larger target segment. Technology as a means of transformation led by passionate founders, designed for the next generation of young digitally native learners is what Creative Galileo stands for.”
For Kalaari, Creative Galileo happens to be the first investee from its flagship CXXO Programme that it launched earlier this year.
Creative Galileo plans to expand to Southeast Asia and integrate local languages such as Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malaysian into the app. It’s targeting to get 10 million downloads across all markets in the next 14 months.
