WeSkill (JAP Edutainment Private Limited), an online platform that enables live and interactive extracurricular learning for children with a commitment to democratising holistic education by leveraging technology, has raised more than US$ 400K from reputed angel investors and syndicates, as part of its pre-seed round of funding. The round was led by Shrishti Sahu from Swadharma Source Ventures (“SSV”) and was supported by premier angels such Umang Vohra (MD and Global CEO, Cipla), Arpan Sheth (Senior Partner, Bain & Company), Nikhil Srivastava (Partner and MD, Head of India Private Equity at PAG), Renu Satti (COO, Paytm), Narendra Rathi (Investments VP, SoftBank Vision Fund) , Raj Shastri (ex-Partner, Kaizenvest), Sayan Ghosh (VC at International Finance Corporation) , Soonicon LLP (Managed by Former Fitso Founder’s), Mayank Gupta (Co-founder, Zopper), Aditya Pittie (CEO, Pittie Enterprises Group), Rajesh Razdan (Co-founder, Devtron Labs), and IIT Madras professors among others.
Founded by three IIM Ahmedabad alumni, Shaurya Joshi, Shashank Patidar, and Praneet Agarwal, in November 2020, WeSkill was started with the aim of solving the problem of inadequate access and infrastructure to extracurricular activities for children. All three founders come with prolific academic and professional backgrounds but have themselves witnessed the broken extra-curricular learning landscape while growing up. Shaurya is a National Law university alumnus and has previously worked in operations and strategy at Bira91. Shashank is an IIT Bombay alumnus who has previously worked in operations in Ola and in ed-tech consulting at Praxis Global where he saw this growing demand from parents. Praneet is an IIT Delhi alumnus who has previously worked at Paytm and was a consultant at Bain & Company.
Speaking on the funding, Shashank Patidar, Co-Founder, WeSkill said, “When I was working in an ed-tech consulting, I would interview a lot of parents who found a lack of access to high-quality extra-curricular learning to be a major setback and were seeking a solution. This reminded me of my childhood of having grown up in a non-metro city, where there was a lack of focus on holistic development for children. Through our solution, we wanted to empower students to access this opportunity to learn.”
“When we started WeSkill, we did not anticipate such a high demand coming from all parts of the country. However, consistently high NPS and retention numbers from learners, our courses, delivered in six different languages, indicate a universal demand for solutions which provide long term learning opportunities and can be accessed from a safe space and at a convenient time” added Shaurya Joshi, Co-Founder, WeSkill.
Commenting further, Praneet Agarwal, Co-Founder, WeSkill said, “Right from the beginning, we were clear that building a scalable tech-based learning solution will be a key imperative for us to solve the access problem while ensuring an interactive and engaging learning experience. The incumbent learning solutions for activities like dance are either through “massive, but passive” channels like Youtube or “intimate, but sub-scale” channels like offline classes and thus we built our product strategy to solve this problem.”