Soros-backed Aspada invests in Xamcheck

Aspada Investment Company has made a commitment of Rs 11 crore ($1.8 million) to Xamcheck, an independent third-party assessment, test design, and feedback solution for K-12 schools in India. 

 

Xamcheck was founded by Naveen Mandava and Varun Kumar and incubated within Policy Innovations, an educational consultancy founded by the team in 2009. 

 

“By working specifically to understand problem areas on a student-by-student basis, and by being able to offer a personalised, immediate, and actionable means to address the issue, we have seen an overwhelmingly positive response from parents and teachers who have desired better learning outcomes but have not been able to achieve them with traditional testing methods,” explained Naveen Mandava, Co-founder of Xamcheck and previously a Doctoral Fellow at the RAND Graduate School of Policy Analysis, USA.

 

“The vast majority of schools do not offer personalised learning or use feedback from exams to remedy learning deficiencies. With Aspada’s investment we will continue to invest heavily in our backend technology while also focusing on achieving significant scale in bringing Xamcheck to the thousands of underserved K-12 schools in India.”, said Varun Kumar, Co-founder of Xamcheck who had worked earlier at ITC and is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur.

 

“The Xamcheck team draws on significant experience in testing and assessments and is truly at the forefront of addressing a pain point faced by schools, students, teachers, and principals alike. Having conducted over 500,000 assessments over the last 3 years, we believe that the company has the ability to achieve massive scale and play a transformational role in improving student learning outcomes in the large and underserved state-board school segment in India. Importantly, Xamcheck does not require changes in consumer behavior as it integrates seamlessly into current testing practices in school, thereby helping to ensure rapid adoption”, said Kartik Srivatsa of Aspada Investment Advisors.

 

The Aspada Investment Company is a holding company backed with a significant commitment from the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF). The firm is an active investor in India, with investments across agricultural supply chains and logistics, financial services, and affordable education and healthcare. Aspada also manages the portfolio of the SONG Fund, an early stage venture capital firm funded by the Soros Economic Development Fund, Omidyar Network, and Google.