According to official sources on January 23, Bangalore headquartered Math learning startup Cuemath has raised $15 million in its Series B round of funding from CapitalG and Sequoia India. CapitalG (formerly known as Google Capital), the growth equity investment fund of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), led this round of funding. When asked about the rationale behind this investment, Kaushik Anand, CapitalG’s Head of India Investments, said, “We believe technology can help solve the strong desire and need for quality education. And Cuemath has scaled with great unit economics and capital efficiency. We are happy to be supporting Cuemath on the quest of transforming the way math is experienced by children across the globe.”
Cuemath is an after-school math excellence programme for children from Kindergarten to grade 8 and is offered through home-based centres. Cuemath strives to make children great at math with the belief that math can transform a child’s future. The centres are managed and run by trained and certified Cuemath Teachers who share Cuemath’s vision of math excellence. Founded in 2013, Cuemath now has over 2,000 centres educating more than 10,000 students across the country.
By March 2018, Cuemath aims to establish 5,000 centres and enroll 40,000 children in the programme. The funds raised will be utilised towards making the learning system more powerful and expanding to more cities across the country.
According to Manan Khurma, Cuemath’s founder and CEO, “Math is the skill of the future. Given the way technology is evolving, the most valuable ability in just a few years from now will be that of complex problem-solving, and the best way to build that ability is to build a strong and holistic math foundation. Schools, by design, cater to only a limited subset of math. Although many of them do a good job at it, our children need much more. Cuemath takes math excellence to a wholly different level. Through its multi-format tech-enabled learning system, Cuemath ensures that children not only master math but also fall in love with it.”
Interestingly, Cuemath is creating high impact across two very distinct demographics. On the one hand, they are making thousands of children great at math and promising to build the next generation of thinkers. On the other, they are offering a prestigious home-based career opportunity to educated women who are looking to switch, restart or kick-start their careers. Many women who chose to become Cuemath Teachers are now financially independent, earning significant incomes through a home-based occupation which is very meaningful, has immense impact and gives them great pleasure.
“Cuemath’s data and technology is used to define each student’s learning trajectory and guide the Cuemath Teacher on exactly what to teach and how to teach it. We believe this kind of in-person learning is extremely valuable from a young learner’s perspective. This unique model sets us apart and we don’t see any direct competition in the market yet, although we’d be more than happy if other players were to take our path in this quest of creating a global math revolution,” says Anshumani Ruddra, chief product officer at Cuemath and earlier VP of Product at Practo.
“The most exciting aspect about the Cuemath programme is how the unique technology and learning system inspires a love for mathematics in children at a very young age. Manan and the team have spent years perfecting a new way of teaching math to young children and delivering it through a unique partner model, and this round of funding gives them the ability to expand the business dramatically,” said Abheek Anand, principal, Sequoia Capital India Advisors. Currently, Cuemath has a strong presence in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad, with over 300 math excellence centres in each of these cities.
Cuemath is an after-school math excellence programme for children from KG to grade 8 and is offered through home-based centres. For more information, please visit https://www.cuemath.com/.