US-based Unreasonable Capital Invests in Gurgaon-based Stones2Milestones
Colorado, US-based Unreasonable Capital, an early stage investor focused on emerging markets, has made its debut investment in India as well as Asia with Gurgaon-based edtech startup Stones2Milestones. InMobi co-founder Piyush Shah also participated in the this round of funding. The financial details of the fund transaction remain undisclosed however.
Stones2Milestones is a social enterprise in the education space that aims to impact the way in which school going children between the ages of 3 to class 3 learn to read in English.
Stones2Milestones was founded in 2008 by two enterprising individuals from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad – Kavish Gadia and Aditi Mehta. The startup is solving a very problem of India that remained unaddressed for ages. Children in India going to English medium schools fall behind academically because they are expected to learn, read and speak in a language that is alien to them and their surroundings – English. The startup is solving this problem of school children by giving them an affordable, research based, scientifically designed and intuitive in-school reading programs which are systematic, contextual and age-appropriate, currently impacting more than 100,000 children across 15 cities.
In 2016, the startup had raised Rs 2 crore from clutch of angel investors. Also, Chairman of Industrial Finance Corporation of India (IFCI), Dr. E S Rao, current, is another investor in the startup.
Notably, is also a part of recently announced first batch of GMC Calibrator, an accelerator program of impact investor Gray Matters Capital. GMC Calibrator is India’s first accelerator program focused on improving learning outcomes via better ‘User Engagement Design’ of mobile apps of enterprises in the ‘Learning to Earning’ space.
“Creating awareness, diagnosing reading gaps and making reading abilities a strong part of our dinner table conversations is the first step to taking action. Currently, the country doesn’t have any reading level benchmarks and we are attempting to change that by taking the FAST assessment, from 100 schools last year to 1.5 million children in the next 12 months,” said Aditi Mehta, co-author at Stones2Milestones.
Coming on to Unreasonable Capital, it is an impact investor which typically invests in sectors such as clean energy, financial technologies, innovations in agriculture and artisan-driven fashion.
Recent Fundings in EdTech Sector
In May, Bangalore-based edtech startup Knudge.me raised undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) along with participation from Axilor Ventures, a seed fund and accelerator founded by industry veterans including S Shibulal and Kris Gopalakrishnan, among others.
In April, IndigoLearn has raised $150,000 in a seed funding round from a group of angel investors based in India, the US and Europe.
Prior to that, Gurgaon-based Doubtnut, a multi lingual online learning platform for students, also raised ₹3.5 crore in a pre-series A round of funding led by WaterBridge Ventures with participation from Omidyar Network. Prior to this, Bengaluru IMAX Program has raised $13.5 million from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, LGT Impact Ventures and existing investor Aspada, in February.
Additionally, it may also be recalled that S Shibulal, one of the founders of Axilor Ventures, has launched EduMentum — an incubator for early-stage startups working in the space of offline education transformation.
Source: IndianWeb2
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