Jungle Ventures, Sequoia back overseas edtech startup Leap in $17-mn round

Overseas education startup Leap, which is building a suite of products and services for students to study abroad, has raised $17 million in Series B round of funding led by Singapore-based Jungle Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital India and Owl Ventures. This comes in less than a year after Leap raised $5.5 million led by Sequoia Capital India, taking the total capital raised by the startup to $22.5 million.

The Silicon Valley-headquartered startup will use the new capital to expand its product portfolio. It plans to further strengthen its team across technology and business functions, expand geographically and grow its student communities aggressively. The company will also establish global offices for institutional partnerships and other business functions.

Founded in 2019 by Vaibhav Singh and Arnav Kumar, Leap is a one-stop solution for study abroad aspirants with several products such as test preparation for IELTS, admission counselling, and financing. It has offices in Canada, the UK and Australia apart from India.

Singh said Covid has allowed the Leap team the time to build the foundation of the business with an online community of over 500,000 students registered on the platform as of now. “As we come out of Covid, we are fully geared up for massive scale as the world slowly comes back to normal. Not only do we have the natural demand to cater to in 2021, we have a backlog of students from 2020 as well. So Covid has given us an opportunity to hyper accelerate now given the next 12-18 months, demand will be much larger,” said Singh. The company has already served 20,000 students in their journey to go and study abroad. Singh said since the company has been monetising all their products from day one, the company is confident of double digit million dollar revenue by the end of the year.

“Leap marks our first investment in the edu-tech space. India is the second-largest market globally for overseas enrolment, and in just a decade overseas higher education annual enrolments from India are up more than 300 per cent,” said Amit Anand, Founding Partner, Jungle Ventures.