Published: 12/8/2020
Good morning, it's Tuesday and Anmol here with the updates. I think this is going to be an exciting week with the Airbnb, DoorDash (and Pubmatic IPOs). On to the news today and companies enabling WFH are raising capital in India; and another EdTech raises a large growth round.
➡️ 9 months into the pandemic, it's certain that for a lot of startups work will never go back to the old normal. And as employees and startups have gotten more comfortable with remote work, companies have emerged making remote work more collaborative, productive and personal.
➡️ The two interesting trends in this article were that Indian SaaS companies are raising capital and building for a global companies from day 1, while a bunch of companies from the US and are also expanding to India as there is a very real market need for such products and a propensity to pay.
➡️ We've seen online & hybrid event-management platforms like Hublio and Airmeet raise a bunch of venture capital as we move into a time-period where we're spending an increasing amount of time on video.
➡️ Other companies are trying to bring teams and companies closer together are also popping up (Lets Dive in Surge 04 is an example). I started my new job in a completely remote environment and 90%+ of the company's lifetime has been spent while the entire team has been remote. I was also lucky in the sense that I had known half the company since college but I can imagine connecting with your coworkers in a remote-first setting might not be the easiest
➡️ And the other interesting anecdote that companies enabling remote work in the US (eg: Fishbowl) are also looking towards India as a market to help in the transition. As remote work is becoming the norm in the US, India is following the trend as well. And while certainly things will (and have) return to some sense of normalcy where people work from offices, I think we'll be saying- Nothing Was The Same.
2. https://bit.ly/3mWxxdQ: Cuemath raises a $40M Series C
➡️ *insert generic quote about EdTech and 2020* and we have another one- Cuemath has raised $40M in a Series C round co-led by Lightstone Fund and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation. The funding comes a year after the company's $5.5M Series B and values the company >$170M.
➡️ The company has already been backed by the likes of Google and Sequoia India (which has a killer EdTech portfolio in BYJUs, Unacademy, Doubtnut, Cuemath, Classplus and more), and the fundraise doesn't really come as a surprise.
➡️ The company provides after-school math classes and has over 5000 franchises in the country conducting 25M classes for 100k students. The company also grew its digital platform 4x during the pandemic and has over 500k hours of live classes. Interestingly the company also covers global curriculums and tutors children in the US, Europe and Australia (though unsure of what the break up is).
➡️ The company will probably use their proceeds to accelerate their growth and potentially also grow out their online coding classes (which seems like a more recently inclusion).
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/tanayj/status/1336006850681008129
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