Bengaluru-based BitClass, a PaaS (Product-as-a-Service) platform for teacherpreneurs, has raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by Venture Highway.
AET Japan, Figure Eight Investments, and Waterbridge Ventures also participated in the round, according to a press statement.
Founded in April 2020 by Gunjan Kejriwal and Utsav Tiwary, BitClass is focused on helping ‘teacherpreneurs’ set up and grow their independent live classes and build businesses online. It empowers anyone who wants to teach their skills to the world, and helps them set up and grow their business online by providing them with all the tools.
BitClass enables teachers with no technical knowledge to set up live classes in just few minutes and grow their brand. The startup claims to currently have more than 2,200 teacherpreneurs actively teaching and selling their live classes ranging from yoga and fitness, programming for kids and adults, music and dance, arts and craft, data science, personality development, sewing, handicraft making, to offbeat ones like jewellery design, hair styling, DIY mask, festive desserts making, home decorations, and more.
Speaking about the company, Gunjan Kejriwal, Co-founder, BitClass, said in a statement,
“We built BitClass to empower all kinds of teachers around the world to be able not just to establish an online presence and manage their existing workflows better online, but also be able to reach and acquire new potential learners efficiently, without much marketing and tech know-how.”
“At BitClass, we believe that the future would demand more online real-time interactions, more so for education/learning-related use cases where live interactions among teachers and students can make all the difference. Our focus has been on building growth-focused tech tools and features, including an AI-based sales assistant for teacherpreneurs to scale their live teaching businesses.”
According to a statement, the latest funding will help the startup to make investments in technology and grow and scale the business to bring more teacherpreneurs onto its platform.
Complimenting the company, Priya Mohan, startup sensei at Venture Highway, said,
“COVID-19 has induced significant tailwinds for online/live services. However, in our view, models should be calibrated for post COVID scenarios with a longer-term view accounting for potential behavior changes. We found Gunjan’s and Utsav’s insights into building a solution for teacherpreneurs offering live instructional content unique.”
Ravi Kaushik, Partner at Waterbridge Ventures, also commented in a statement saying, “We believe live learning is the future and BitClass is building the infrastructure to enable offline teachers to come into the online education system, empowering them to set up live teaching businesses online.”
BitClass raised its Pre-Seed funding from Waterbridge Ventures, Better Capital, Raven Sastry of Multiply Ventures, and Amarendra Sahu, Co-founder and CEO of Nestaway, in July 2020.
