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Online life-skills development platform for children, Uable, on Wednesday announced that it has raised $3.5 million in pre-series A round led by JAFCO Asia and Chiratae Ventures. Existing investor 3one4 Capital also participated in the round. With this round, Supriya Singh, Director of South Asia investments, JAFCO Asia, will join the Uable board.

According to the official statement, the latest round of funding will help Uable build a global team, scale the product globally, and add more real world domains for teenagers to explore.

Announcing the funding, Saurabh Saxena, Founder and CEO, Uable, said,

“At Uable, we are challenging the status quo of education, where for decades and possibly centuries, the notion that securing the highest marks, grades, and degrees alone determined one’s future and chances of success. However, we are here to change that notion and bring a paradigm shift in education.”

“The way we are differentiated is that we are not about ‘test prep’ or ‘course prep’ but about ‘life prep’. We believe through the right guidance, mentorship, inspiration, and information, teenagers can discover that their passion can find a career path. We are excited to have on-board our new investors who are aligned with this vision of ours,” added Saurabh.

Founded in 2020 by Saurabh Saxena, (who formerly co-founded Vedantu), Uable aims to empower teens between 13 and 18 years of age to discover and design their own career paths in the 21st century future of work domains including but not limited to AI, Climate Change, Gig Economy, Space Tech, and Robotics.

According to UNICEF, over half of Indian students will not have skills for 21st century jobs. It warns, in India, as many as 53 percent will leave secondary school without getting the skills needed for a decent job. This glaring industry-academia gap offers an immense opportunity for models like Uable to bring early-intervention and prepare teenagers for the future. 

Commenting on the investment, Supriya Singh, the Director of South Asia investments for JAFCO Asia, said,

“I joined Uable first as a parent and then as an investor. Saurabh is a truly visionary leader who brings creativity with responsibility to Uable’s learning platform. Uable is building a unique peer-to-peer learning platform for children, which will truly empower them with the right mix of skill development, creativity and self-confidence. A platform like Uable is what education in the 21st century should be.”

“While ed-tech-based learning has been democratised and digitised in recent years, the focus on real-world applicability and building of practical use cases and skills for children has remained largely at the periphery. Buoyed by the changes brought about in 2020, building a global-first platform while keeping in mind this ethos is at the heart of Saurabh’s vision for Uable and we’re excited about taking it from India to the world,” according to Karan Mohla, Partner at Chiratae Ventures Advisors.

Further adding, Anurag Ramdasan, Head of Investments at 3one4 Capital, stated, “We have been working with Saurabh ever since he began work on his next idea in ed-tech. His incredible passion for ensuring quality and focus on building a scalable peer learning model focused on the overall development of teenagers is something that aligns with our focus in this space. We are excited to partner with Uable for building an educational paradigm that focuses on measurable development at scale and enables a whole new generation to learn the skills of the future.”