Aakash Chaudhry’s Sparkl Edventure Bags $4 Mn From Zomato, Zerodha Founders

Aakash Chaudhry, the cofounder of offline coaching institute Aakash Educational Services Limited, has reportedly secured a seed funding of $4 Mn (around INR 34 Cr) from Zomato’s founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal and Zerodha’s cofounder and CEO Nithin Kamath for his new online tutoring platform Sparkl Edventure.

As per ET’s report, other marquee investors are also expected to join the cap table apart from Zerodha founder’s fintech and sustainability-focused fund Rainmatter and Goyal.

Inc42 has reached out to Chaudhry for comments on the development. The story will be updated based on his response.

Chaudhry launched Sparkl in October this year, along with the founders of Meritnation.com Pavan Chauhan and Ritesh Hemrajani. This new venture offers tailor-made learning programmes for students navigating the international waters of International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge curricula, with its internationally certified and trained teachers, AI enhanced pedagogy, a proprietary technology platform.

Students from cities such as Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad have already been enrolled with Sparkl for its programmes, while it also plans to grow the platform leveraging its tech interventions, based on the report.

As of his last edtech venture, AESL was acquired by troubled edtech giant BYJU’S in a cash-and-stock deal for $1 Bn in 2021. The aftermath saw the two parties lock horns over the share swap as the Chaudhry family, which founded Aakash, refused to swap their shares, and Chaudhry retains an 11% stake in AESL today.

It is to note that, in September, Aakash Educational Services was known to be chalking out a revamping strategy ‘Aakash 2.0’ aimed at scaling up its operations, bringing efficiency and building hybrid learning centres.

This development comes at a time when the edtech sector has been seeing a revival in investor trust on their plans of expanding their offerings and presence.

Case in point, Kreedo Early Childhood Solutions, a startup that offers transformation solutions for early learning in schools, raised INR 10 Cr ($1.2 Mn) in debt funding from Recur Club to boost its product offerings and expand operations, a few weeks ago.

Prior to that, edtech startup Bhanzu raised $16.5 Mn (around INR 139 Cr) in its Series B funding round led by VC firm Epiq Capital, to strengthen its presence in the US, in November. 

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