CueMath raises $4 million in Series A from Sequoia Capital, Unitus Seed Fund

Firm plans to use the money to expand reach of its platform and get close to their goal of 25,000 teachers and 50,000 students in 2 years

CueMath, an NCR-based edu-tech company, announced that it raised funds worth $4 million from Sequoia Capital and Unitus Seed Fund as part of its Series A funding. The self-learning platform aims to monetize the after-school teaching market.  

The company through the web, approaches teachers and puts them through rigorous background testing before accepting them. The company then gets into a revenue share with these teachers. CueMath has an acceptance rate of about 5%.

The company plans to use the funds to increase the reach of the platform and get close to their ultimate aim of reaching 25,000 teachers and 50,000 students in the next two years. Currently, it has 1,200 teachers on its rolls. 

Cuemath plans to get to 5,000 teachers by March 2017

“Cuemath’s USP lies in their innovative distribution model. The concept of empowering homemakers and enabling them to run home-based learning centres is something that is both highly scalable and impactful,” said Abheek Anand, Principal, Sequoia Capital India Advisors.

The company is present in six cities and plans to hit tier-2 and 3 cities next year. “We also plan to approach the international markets next year. The concept of learning maths is the same throughout the world. Currently, we are evaluation our options on which country to start with for our pilot programme,” said Manan Khurma, founder, CueMath.

Khurma, however, admits that edu-tech companies have been struggling to get a foothold in the market with several downing their shutters. “Edu-tech companies are in trouble but that is because they are trying to solve a problem that isn’t really there. Most of them run a market place for teachers. Finding teachers isn’t the problem, finding a quality educator is,” he added.

This is Sequoia’s second investment in the past three months in an edu-tech company within the last three months. 

In March, Byju’s classes raised $75 million from Sequoia and Sofina. Byju’s, with its strong base in content creation, too relied on machine learning to manage the student’s rate of learning, a model used by CueMath as well. However, Khurma denied that there was a conflict of interest or obvious overlaps.