Educate Online, an all-in-one platform that connects international students to UK, US and Canadian schools, raised $4 million in funding from Xploration Capital, TMT Investments, Flyer One Ventures, Softline, and Angelsdeck.
The company will use the capital for scaling in LATAM, Asia and the Middle East, development of its technology platform and building a worldwide community of students.
With Educate Online, students can choose from 450+ subjects offered by leading schools in the US, UK, and Canada – and then study them remotely, full-time or part-time, without having to move to another country and bear the related costs. In the past 12 months, 2500+ students from 18 countries have enrolled in the school of their choice with Educate Online. To ease the transition for the students, the company engages with an international team of experts who are able to provide academic and personal counselling support in their own language.
“Educate Online was founded in 2018 and since then has placed more than 4,000+ children between the ages of 4-19 in top schools”, said Alexander Zheltov, co-founder and CEO of Educate Online. “After COVID-19 hit, we made a hard pivot to online education as we were seeing a surge of interest towards online education – in 2020 we grew 5.5 times and we expect to continue growing 3-5x year-over-year”.
While the platform mostly provides online experiences, it also offers options for students to participate in on-campus summer or semester programs, university exploration tours, cultural/language travel and local meet-ups whenever it’s possible. In 2019, Educate Online developed The Hub, a platform for engaging students of all ages in online K-12 study, ESOL, career exploration, university preparation, and internship & mentorship programs.
“Schools have historically been very local operations. Few have branched out to other countries, primarily through building foreign campuses and local partnerships. ”, said Eugene Timko, Managing Partner at Xploration Capital. “This has significantly limited the potential reach for international school education. Educate Online may become the dominant online layer on top of the existing schools’ infrastructure, vastly expanding the current market for cross-border education”.
“Educate Online provides a unique opportunity to receive online education of the same quality as it was offline at the top-rated schools abroad for people from all kinds of backgrounds. Thus, the startup creates unique social value, giving many parents a chance to ensure their kids have the best education possible”, says Evgeny Galiakhmetov, co-founder of AngelsDeck.
“Educate Online not only gives kids from emerging countries an opportunity to get a high-quality secondary education, but it also paves the way for a better future, in which they can be accepted by tier-1 colleges and get dream jobs in Big Tech or on Wall Street”, said Elena Mazhuha, Investment Director at Flyer One Ventures.
“We are pleased to support the Educate Online team in the new round. They have a wonderful, highly sought-after product that helps children around the world to get a Western education. The new round will help the product grow even more actively”, said Artyom Inyutin, Co-founder & Managing Partner at TMT Investments.
