Bengaluru-based QShala, owned by Walnut Knowledge Solutions, on 10 September 2020, has raised INR 2.7 crore (around $367K) from Rainmatter Capital, a Zerodha-backed investment fund. Zerodha is a Bengaluru-based fintech platform that offers retail and institutional broking, currencies and commodities trading, mutual funds, and bonds. Kalyan Banerjee, the cof-ounder of Mindtree also co-led the investment.
The round also saw participation from a number of other angel investors, including former director of Lowe Lintas Preeti Sawhney, co-founder of Ubiquity Capital Nikhil Bhandarkar, Sanjay Tambwekar, CTO of end-to-end gifting solutions company Qwikcilver, former vice president of Oracle India Suresh Kumar Pinglay and Akshita Ganesh, product and strategy lead of Reforge, among others also participated in the round.
The company will utilise the fresh capital to expand its footprint to more cities across India and globally, to cater to children in the age group of eight to 16 years.
Founded by 2014 by Raghav Chakravarthy and Sachin Ravi, QShala offers out-of-school learning solutions to students through quizzing. Both of the founders were college-mates and shared a common interest in quizzing.
The edtech startup has designed programmes for children from Class 1 onwards which use questions along with comprehension, context building, listening, storytelling and other activities to help kids construct a framework of how to think. The “Quriosity Curriculum” is designed to nurture and nourish imagination and curiosity while focusing on learning that goes way beyond the school curriculum, the company claims.
Speaking of the latest development for QShala, Chakravarthy in a statement said,
“We are delighted with the support we have received from Rainmatter Capital and other investors. These investments reinforce our belief in QShala’s curriculum, learning experience, and the platform through which we address the need for developing skills and aptitudes in young minds,”
Commenting on the funding round for QShala, Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO, Zerodha, said,
“It is important for children to develop critical and lateral thinking from a young age much beyond their classroom framework in today’s world. We are rapidly moving towards subjective learning where they would need to build a skill set actually required for employability in the future. We have always been big believers in the philosophy of constant upskilling and retraining. Rainmatter is glad to partner with like-minded people focused on helping kids build these skill sets.”
