India’s LEAD School Startup raises USD 30 Million to reach more students
The startup began its journey by initially setting up its own schools in rural areas in India to identify the challenges that students and teachers comes up.
An Indian ed-tech startup that is helping in digitizing and transforming affordable private schools to better serve students from middle level and low level income groups of families has raised USD 30 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its efforts in the world’s second most populous nation.
GSV Ventures and WestBridge took over the Series D financing round of the Indian ed-tech startup, which has raised over USD 69 million till date. LEAD School, was incorporated by a couple Sumeet Mehta and Smita Deorah in 2012. It has developed an integrated system to help K-12 schools with the curriculum they teach, how they teach, secure books and other resources from vendors, and better evaluation of learning outcome.
The startup began its journey by initially setting up its own schools in rural areas in India to identify the challenges that students and teachers comes up. They found that students struggled with english and needed years of learning just to be able to fully understand any other subject, most of which were taught in english.
From many years, LEAD School has tied-up to work with affordable private schools. Deorah stated that the startup’s original mission statement is to work with schools to empower students from low-income families is remains intact even as it scales and that its strategy to partner with schools has helped it serve more students. He further added that, due to the global outbreak, which prompted New Delhi to shut down schools last year. LEAD School’s offering has proven even more useful to schools. The startup, which today caters around 2,000 schools and 800,000 students, grew up by 3 times last year.
