Fresh from raising a $244 million Series C (that valued the company at $1.7 billion) back in June, K12 online tutoring marketplace GoStudent has now raised a $340 million Series D round led by new investor Prosus, an Amsterdam-based investment firm best known for investing in Latin American and U.S.-based LatinX internet properties. GoStudent expanded to Mexico this year.
Also participating was Deutsche Telekom, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tencent, Dragoneer, Left Lane Capital and Coatue.
That makes $669 million raised since GoStudent was founded in Vienna in 2016, giving it a notional $3.5 billion / €3 billion valuation.
In a statement, Felix Ohswald, co-founder and CEO of GoStudent said: “Education has seen a whirlwind of change, from remote classrooms to increased academic ambitions, and we believe there is a big opportunity to transform how students learn all over the world by expanding access to quality education.”
The new funding will be used for international expansion, product expansion through M&A and increased market share in existing geographies, said the company.
Fahd Beg, COO, Prosus EdTech, said: “GoStudent has built a highly scalable business offering a superb customer experience. The company is creating a leading global platform for K12 education and the speed at which they are growing is impressive. We are living through a time when technology is transforming education globally and the inspiring vision of founders like Felix and Gregor will reshape how students learn in the future.”
In 2021, GoStudent expanded to 16 countries, including Canada and Mexico, and opened 19 international office locations.
The company said it plans to enter a “minimum” of six markets this year, including new regions such as the U.S., Asia-Pacific and the MENA region; grow and diversify its range of services through M&A (it acquired the all-in-one school communication app Fox Education in September 2021) and invest in existing regions where tutoring services are “highly fragmented and traditionally offline”.
GoStudent is surfing a wave of interest in edtech following the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced students into online learning, and subsequently became seen as a much more efficient way to get tutoring (as well as being COVID-safe). In addition to GoStudent, Kahoot!, the Norwegian gamified learning platform, is another European edtech unicorn.
After an earlier period of experimentation with business models, GoStudent started to focus more squarely on one-to-one tutoring. It now lets students and their parents pick tutors for general tutoring or specifically with the aim of taking an exam. Tutors are tested, vetted and interviewed by GoStudent before they can join the platform. That strategy and the pandemic have come together to create a perfect opportunity for the company — and any other edtech startup.
