Edtech Startup DoubtNut Raises Fresh Round of Funding

DoubtNut, a multi-lingual online learning platform that leverages AI to provide solutions to students’ math queries, announced a fresh round of investment on Tuesday. The round was led by Surge, an initiative by Sequoia India, with participation from existing investors WaterBridge Ventures & Omidyar Network India and new investor, AET, Japan. The company will use the freshly infused capital to deepen and widen its product offerings in terms of subjects, languages and classes and expand its team.
The app was launched in October 2017 by Tanushree Nagori and Aditya Shankar, IIT-Delhi alumni who are veterans in the education space. Over 90% of DoubtNut users study in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and much of the growth continues to come from outside India’s larger metropolitan centers. The app is currently ranked among the top 10 free education apps on the Google Play store in India.
Indian students tend to solve a lot of their doubts after class hours, making them the ideal target audience for this service. A student approximately spends three hours working on solving questions. Workload for students, especially in urban India, is very high and parents tend to have a higher involvement in helping their children with homework.
Tanushree Nagori, co-founder, DoubtNut said, “DoubtNut is on a mission to democratize education.  According to two different studies, doubt clearance and homework help are the biggest student needs and 62% of Indian parents spend 12 hours per week on that. We are using technology to solve for the students’ biggest pain point and aim to provide a comprehensive education solution to all students in the language and in the manner that they understand the best.”
WaterBridge Ventures and Omidyar Network India were the first institutional investors in the company.
Commenting on the transaction, Sarbvir Singh, Managing Partner, WaterBridge Ventures said, “We remain very excited about Aditya and Tanushree’s vision of building a student first, inclusive education platform catering to all Indians. DoubtNut has made a lot of progress over the last one year and we have no doubt that the best is yet to come.”
“DoubtNut has the potential to create meaningful, equitable impact for millions of underserved students in India. Tanushree and Aditya’s insights came from their own experience where despite great teaching, they were not able to cater to individual doubt resolutions of students without turning to technology. Their passion led them to launch the app in 12 vernacular languages in a really short time and creating relevant learning journeys for the next half billion users”, says Namita Dalmia, Principal, Investments, Omidyar Network India.
Yuki Kawamura, Principal, and Head of India Investments at AET Fund says, “We’re thrilled to join the journey of DoubtNut. Our belief is that video is the key content medium for next 500m digital content consumers and DoubtNut will be a great service for vernacular students who want to be prosperous. Learning is something that broadens students’ horizons and opportunities which result in bringing a lot of joy to their lives. The partnership between Tanushree and Aditya who have great experience in education, and AET who has expertise in content will enable accelerating the growth of DoubtNut.”