Camp K12, a Gurugram-based edtech startup focused on building a global online school for K-12, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Matrix Partners India and SAIF Partners.
Founded in 2010 by Anshul Bhagi and Sandeep Bhagi, Camp K12 brings 21st century skills to students located anywhere in the world. It connects students from kindergarten to 12th grade, providing access to quality teachers for interactive, gamified, and live-learning courses for STEAM subjects. It offers online coding, math, and logic courses including mobile app development, artificial intelligence, 3D coding, web development, python programming, game programming, and other extra curriculars to students age 5-18.
Built as India’s first coding bootcamp for K-12 students, Camp K12 has so far trained over 50,000 students and partnered with 100s schools and institutions across the country.
Highlighting schools haven’t changed in hundred years and that it aims to transform that, Anshul Bhagi, Co-founder of Camp K12, said in a statement,
“Schools haven’t changed in a 100 years. Kids today learn the same things that their parents learned a generation ago, and they learn in the same factory batch-processing sort of way. At Camp K12, we’re re-imagining what school would look like if we could build from scratch today in 2020, for the next 100 years. We’re redefining what we teach, and how we teach, taking inspiration from gig economy plays that efficiently match supply with demand and from large online, social, multiplier gaming experiences that kids love to spend time on.”
Anshul is an MIT and Harvard Business School graduate. He has previously worked with McKinsey, Google and Microsoft, and was part of the team at MIT that developed coding-for-kids platform “MIT AppInventor”, which has over 10 million users worldwide.
Appreciating Camp K12 and its team, Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix Partners India, said,
“With the increasing penetration of devices and the internet across the globe, online learning for kids is becoming the norm. The team’s razor-sharp focus on building a truly 10X better product that enables highly engaging learning experiences for kids, sets them apart from global peers. We are privileged to be on this journey with Anshul and Sandeep along with our co-investors SAIF Partners, to build the global online school of the future”
Mukul Arora, Managing Director, SAIF Partners, also commented saying,
“Parents are increasingly feeling the need to equip their children with new age skills beyond academics. For many of these skills, live online video and interactive mentor-led instruction are far more powerful than what is available for kids today. Camp K12’s custom-built virtual classroom environment for small-group learning, their pedagogy, and their curriculum reflect a passion for education, deep consumer understanding, and profound technical capability. We feel this market is going to grow exponentially and Camp K12 is well positioned to capture it, at global scale. We’re thrilled to be a part of this journey with the founders and Matrix Partners India.”
Sandeep Bhagi, Co-founder of Camp K12, and former Apple India country manager, also expressed his excitement for the new partnership saying,
“Our last few years working with parents, schools, and students has taught us the art of engaging young students and teaching essential 21st century skills through hands-on tinkering and problem solving. In this journey, Anshul and I are excited to partner with Matrix and SAIF, two VCs with solid experience backing leading online companies across India, China, and the US. We are aggressively hiring teachers and operators who are excited about building a global online school of the future.”
While Camp K12 currently specializes in providing STEAM courses to students from kindergarten to class 12, in the long run, it aims to build a product that is much more global in nature.
