Lido Learning raises $7.5 million from Alibaba-backed BAce Capital

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Online tutorial platform Lido Learning said on April 7 it had raised $7.5 million in a Series B funding round led by BAce Capital, a venture capital firm backed by Ant Financial which is the finance arm of the Chinese giant Alibaba.

Lido provides online tutorials for maths and science in small batches--six students per teacher—for classes 5-9 in India’s ICSE and CBSE syllabus.

The year-old startup has more than 2,000 paying users and a thousand teachers on its platform, founder and CEO Sahil Sheth told Moneycontrol.

“At Lido, we want to make sure the online tutorial experience is significantly better than what you can get offline. That is why from day one we have been focused on building extreme personalisation for every student’s needs, with AI and advanced analytics, while still keeping the fun of going to tuition classes with friends,” Sheth said.

Sheth was earlier with Byju’s, one of India’s most valuable start-ups that was last valued at $8 billion by Tiger Global Management.

Lido and other ed-tech firms have also seen a sharp rise in usage due to the 21-day lockdown announced to curb the spread of coronavirus that has shut schools and colleges.

“Our user acquisition has gone up 2x since the lockdown, and even before that with schools in large cities shutting down we were seeing a rise in usage. So while most companies are becoming cautious, we are growing and hiring aggressively- onboarding a 100 teachers a week,” Sheth said.

Its existing investors, who also participated in the round include angel investors such as Ronnie Screwvala (Founder, Unilazer Ventures) and Ananth Narayanan (CEO, Medlife).

The online education startup had in late March raised a funding round of $3 million from Paytm President Madhur Deora, and Picus Capital, a fund started by Alex Samver, formerly with German internet firm Rocket Internet.