[Funding Alert] Vietnam’s Edupia raises $14 Mn Series A to bridge the education gap

In Vietnam, there is a significant education gap between urban areas with access to more resources and the smaller cities and rural areas, where 80% of students reside. With its live classes and private tutoring, the online learning portal Edupia is bridging this gap.

The startup confirmed recently that it has raised a $14 million Series A round, with participation from eWTP Capital, ThinkZone Ventures, and Jungle Ventures. With this addition, Edupia’s funding now totals $16 million.

There are currently 400,000 paying users among the 5 million users of Edupia. An English self-learning platform created in 2018 by Tran Duc Hung, Edupia is on course to surpass its $100 million revenue objective in the following three years.

Although the majority of its users are in Vietnam, Edupia is also growing in other Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar, and adding new subjects like mathematics and coding.

Before starting Edupia, Hung worked for Viettel, the biggest telco in Vietnam, for ten years as director of digital services. When he was there, he observed how digitalization was changing many facets of daily life, including e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and education.

In addition, Hung mentioned that he noticed a discrepancy between educational resources, particularly in English, that are available in larger, wealthier cities, such as private language centers, and other parts of Vietnam. The possibility to develop an online platform to make English education available to every K–12 student were seen by Hung, whose family includes several instructors.

The team began offering live lessons in March 2021 as demand for more methods to interact with students increased as Edupia’s self-learning company gathered momentum. Self-learning will be the first point of contact for users before they move up to classes and tutoring, according to Hung, who added that Edupia will operate both revenue models simultaneously.

Through a variety of channels, including its web marketing initiatives, school collaborations, word-of-mouth referrals, and key opinion leader (KOL) marketing, parents and students can access Edupia. Through its nationwide sales staff, Edupia has access to all provinces, and it was the first company on the market to establish a network of thousands of micro-KOLs (also known as influencers) across many industries.

There are numerous English-learning apps available, but according to Hung, Edupia does not directly compete with them because it aims to provide students with an environment that is comparable to offline learning facilities, where teachers assign homework, monitor students’ progress, and plan online activities to boost engagement.

In contrast to traditional brick-and-mortar schools, Edupia was able to scale swiftly across Vietnam’s 64 provinces, making it the closest competitor of offline learning centers. Each teacher can oversee up to 2,000 students nationwide, and each learning group consists of 60 students.

Edupia will spend a portion of its new funding to improve its tutoring platform. As it scales and accelerates its global operations, the company also wants to employ senior managers and C-level positions.