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WeSkill (JAP Edutainment Private Limited), an online skilling platform has raised more than $400K in pre-Seed round funding led.
The round was led by Shrishti Sahu from Swadharma Source Ventures (“SSV”) and was supported by other marquee angel investors including Umang Vohra (MD and Global CEO, Cipla), Arpan Sheth (Senior Partner, Bain & Company), Nikhil Srivastava (Partner and MD, Head of India Private Equity at PAG), Renu Satti (COO, Paytm), Narendra Rathi (Investments VP, SoftBank Vision Fund), Raj Shastri (ex-Partner, Kaizenvest), Sayan Ghosh (VC at International Finance Corporation), Soonicon LLP (Managed by Former Fitso Founder’s), Mayank Gupta (Co-founder, Zopper), Aditya Pittie (CEO, Pittie Enterprises Group), Rajesh Razdan (Co-founder, Devtron Labs), and IIT Madras professors among others.
Founded by three IIM Ahmedabad alumni, Shaurya Joshi, Shashank Patidar, and Praneet Agarwal, in November 2020, WeSkill offers courses and workshops for a wide variety of activities like Dance, Music, Arts, and Chess, through live online and interactive classes delivered by professionally trained instructors.
Speaking on the funding, Shashank Patidar, Co-Founder of WeSkill said, “When I was working in an ed-tech consulting, I would interview a lot of parents who found a lack of access to high-quality extra-curricular learning to be a major setback and were seeking a solution. This reminded me of my childhood of having grown up in a non-metro city, where there was a lack of focus on holistic development for children. Through our solution, we wanted to empower students to access this opportunity to learn.”
“When we started WeSkill, we did not anticipate such a high demand coming from all parts of the country. However, consistently high NPS and retention numbers from learners, our courses, delivered in 6 different languages, indicate a universal demand for solutions which provide long term learning opportunities and can be accessed from a safe space and at a convenient time” added Shaurya Joshi, Co-Founder of WeSkill.
Commenting further, Praneet Agarwal, Co-Founder of WeSkill said, “Right from the beginning, we were clear that building a scalable tech-based learning solution will be a key imperative for us to solve the access problem while ensuring an interactive and engaging learning experience. The incumbent learning solutions for activities like dance are either through “massive, but passive” channels like Youtube or “intimate, but sub-scale” channels like offline classes and thus we built our product strategy to solve this problem.”
Speaking about her reasons behind this investment, Shrishti Sahu from SSV said, “Within edtech, the extracurricular segment in India is already a $5.8 billion market in 2021, and continues to expand at an 18% CAGR. The team is aggressively gaining market share by compounding 20% m-o-m in this large market by a product-first approach backed by solid execution and obsession with customers. They have built a superior learning environment and have the potential to revolutionize extracurricular learning for the masses and build the most recognizable and scalable brand for kids and parents.”