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SuperLearn, an after-school learning platform for children, has announced a pre-seed funding round of $300,000 from early stage Japanese VC Incubate Fund and five angel investors, Vishal Bharghav, Rohit Razdan, Padmanabhan Thangarajan, Anuraag Gupta, and Karan Talwar.

With this funding, the startup aims to deepen its product offering by introducing structured programmes, DIY activities etc. The funds will also be utilised to onboard new users to their platform.

Kunal Bhatia, Co-founder, SuperLearn, said: “Despite it being obvious that the early childhood education system is broken in India, there still seems to be no solution to how we are going to mass-educate India. Our vision is to provide millions of underserved children with access to affordable, high quality education.”

“We are doing this by building Internet scale classrooms through which every child can learn whatever interests them in a live class directly from the best educators in their respective fields. In fact, we are building it as a freemium offering such that a lot of kids will be able to learn on the platform for free as well.”

Founded in December 2020 by BITS Pilani alum Kunal Bhatia and SRCC and NMIMS alum Ricky Gupta, SuperLearn has built a community of 40,000 mothers whose kids attend their classes everyday. The startup said the initial phase of growth and traction was fuelled by a WhatsApp-first approach.

It offers webinar-format classes on a wide range of hobby, extracurricular, co-curricular and life-skills activities, including art, craft, dance, yoga, vedic maths, GK, English, science, general awareness, chess etc.

Children have cumulatively consumed over 4.5 million minutes of learning on the platform and their live classes have been attended over 300,000 times.

Ricky Gupta, Co-founder, SuperLearn, said: “An initial realisation that most of us learn how to manage our finances very late in life led us to design and conduct an ‘Intro to Money’ course for a small cohort of kids. Excited by the prospect that their kids can gain important life skills that aren’t taught in school, many parents came back to us requesting us to conduct workshops on a variety of other skills that aren’t taught in school. This led us to the current avatar of building an all-in-one after school learning platform for kids.”

SuperLearn aims to have one million kids learning on the platform in the next 12 months.

Nao Murakami, Founder and General Partner of Incubate Fund India, said: “Accessibility of high quality after-school learning has always been a hassle for parents and kids in India. So, there has been a huge potential demand for online after-school learning.”

He added that the SuperLearn is capturing this opportunity well and the co-founders have been showing a high level of execution capability with a very lean mindset.

“We believe the startup will make affordable and high quality after-school learning accessible to a large section of underserved kids in India,” Murakami said.