LEAD, which enables school classrooms to use online learning tools, announcied on January 13 that it had raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion, catapulting it into the coveted unicorn club of internet startups.
Unicorns are private companies worth a billion dollars or more. LEAD received funding from existing investors WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures.
The acquisition makes it India’s third unicorn of the year, following consumer brand Mamaearth and analytics firm Fractal.
LEAD is also India’s sixth online education unicorn, following Byju’s, Vedantu, Unacademy, Eruditus, and UpGrad.
LEAD, founded in 2012 by Sumeet Mehta and Smita Deorah, works with over 5,000 schools in Tier 2 and 3 cities and beyond to make classroom learning more technologically advanced. This includes tracking teacher and student progress, cloud-based management of school operations, and the provision of digital resources to make learning more engaging. The company claims to have an annual revenue run rate of $80 million.
“A child spends six hours in school and only one hour in tuitions. Transforming schools, when done right, has massive potential to alter our country’s future. LEAD, with its integrated school system, has broken new ground in this direction,” the founders said.
“We believe that in edtech, Saraswati precedes Lakshmi. Our intense focus has been on learning outcomes and life success of our students. And this has resulted in not only strong adoption and retention by schools but also interest from investors who value returns with real impact,” they added.
The agreement also comes at a time when online education startups have agreed to self-regulate under the Internet and Mobile Association of India, following policymakers’ concerns about edtechs’ aggressive sales practises and monopolistic tendencies.
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