In the past week, a total of four companies in the education industry have managed to raise funds. Most of the companies funded serve children aged 0-8 years old, including education content for children, rehabilitation education for children, children’s sports education, early childhood SaaS education. Kaishu storytelling raised C round financing of over USD 50 million accounting for the highest among all four. With many acquisitions and mergers, it can be said that the secondary market this week was quite lively as well.
Kaishu Story (凯叔讲故事) Raises USD 50 Million
Kaishu Story (凯叔讲故事) raised more than USD 50 million Series C round of financing, indicating a rising demand for parenting assistance.
Kaishu Story is a startup which focuses on the overlap of two hot areas: paid online knowledge sharing and early childhood education. Positioning itself as bedtime storytelling product，Kaishu Story started with a Wechat official account in 2014 and launched the App in 2016.
Ingcare (恩启) Completes a USD 4.3 Million A Round of Financing
Founded in 2014 Ingcare (恩启) is a Beijing-based autism recovery services platform which offers educational resources for autistic children. It is committed to providing rehabilitation training and family rehabilitation counseling for children with autism and their parents. The business mainly includes autism rehabilitation teacher training, autistic children evaluation software and SAAS management authorization, and autism children rehabilitation center chain operation.
The company recently announced the completion of it’s A round of financing worth USD 4.3 million. The investment was jointly led by EH capital partners and Insight capital. According to the founder WANG Wei (王伟), the company will use this investment to steadily promote the expansion of its offline store chain which will help achieve an overall improvement in autism.
Since its founding, Ingcare has successively created a training platform for autism rehabilitation teachers, a rehabilitation assessment tool for autistic children, and an online community for rehabilitation training for children with autism. After five years of development, the company has accumulated more than 21,000 rehabilitation teacher training. At present, the company has accumulated more than 17,100 assessments of children with autism.
At the beginning of 2017, Ingcare began to explore the offline chain service business. The company plans to develop and implement a domestically standardized rehabilitation system for children with autism in three years. According to its introduction, the system consists of four modules: standardized course, standardized teaching aids, standardized talent training, and standardized management. As of the first half of 2019, the above system has taken shape, and Ingcare has successfully operated two training centers in the Beijing area.
Therefore, unlike the traditional rehabilitation centers for autistic children, Ingcare has positioned itself as an educational technology company. The team said that the startup will continue to adhere to the core competitiveness of technology and content innovation, and focus on the rehabilitation training needs of families with autistic children in China.
WANG Wei believes: “To solve the problem of rehabilitation education for children with autism, we must solve three problems: “teacher, standardization, and scalability.
“In order to achieve 'standardization', we invest in R&D teaching management software and record the content and effects of the child from diagnosis to capacity assessment to daily rehabilitation training to form a complete rehabilitation teaching data link. By the amount of data accumulated, we can analyze the rehabilitation characteristics of different children, and design more precise and personalized rehabilitation training courses, thus improving the rehabilitation effect."
Little Orange Academy (绿橙教育) Completes B Round of Tens of Million Dollars Financing
On July 25, Little orange announced that it has completed tens of millions of dollars in its series B round of financing. The round was led by Cathay capital. YANG Yun (杨芸), founder and CEO of the company, said that this round of financing will be used to introduce more professional teaching research teams and continue to further develop its technology.
YANG Yun said, "Little Orange has experienced three years of development and has reached a stage where it needs to be fully upgraded. A rapid and stable overall upgrade is inseparable from a high-level and professional team. We will invite higher levels of talents to join Little Orange to comprehensively improve the teaching level of the company and its core professional value of online products."
Little Orange has used Internet tools and data-driven logic to grow rapidly in the early childhood education industry in just three years and has formed the standardization of the teaching system, becoming a unique species in the education industry by bringing a new perspective to the industry.
YANG Yun added “Thanks to investors and parents for their trust in Little Orange, it is not easy to obtain financing in the current policy environment. In the past three years, Little Orange has grown rapidly, but rapid development does bring problems and deficiencies in internal management. We will face it correctly. We will try our best to cultivate internal strength during the winter and strive to live and live well.”
Children's Sports Education Platform, Le Champ (乐冠军) Raises Millions in its Angel Round
On July 26 the company revealed that it has raised millions in its Angel round of financing. The money was raised from an individual investor YAN Chuan (言川). FAN Wei (范晔) the founder of Le champ said that this round of financing will be mainly used for market expansion and online product and service construction.
Le champ was founded by Gymnastics World Champion Fan Wei in August 2017. Currently, it serves children aged 3-6 and provides one-stop sports training services for the B-end market. Services include physical education, gymnastics and rock climbing, sports space design and course equipment, as well as teacher training (with city-level training qualifications) and supply services.
Le champs early childhood physical education curriculum system focuses on happy gymnastics and provides a phased curriculum for children aged 2-3, 4-5 and 5-6 from the emphasis on content-course physical fitness and skills.
Happy gymnastics is a program promoted by the State Sports General Administration. After mastering certain gymnastics skills, children can participate in provincial and national competitions for happy gymnastics.
Fo to B business, Fan Wei said that the current situation in kindergarten is that most of the teachers in the are women, who have rich experience in children's physical and psychological aspects, but there are not many teachers with professional sports teaching ability. Most kindergartens have a higher demand for recreational sports coaches and courses.
The extension of the B-end kindergarten is the main development direction for the Le champ. Currently, in the Hebei and Beijing regions, Le Champ has joined several major education groups, and soon the course will be stationed in more than 100 kindergartens. The supply of teachers, based on FAN Wei’s accumulation in the gymnastics industry for decades, has its resource advantages. In the future, the firm also plans to develop early childhood physical education teacher training for prefecture-level cities.
At present, 90% of Le champs revenue is generated by to B course service and has 1500 paying users. The company plans to increase its other revenue share to 25% in the coming year.
In addition to the newly-increased to C business plan, Le Champ plans its future revenue business including events, cooperation with sports organizations, research, and development of children's extracurricular activities, summer camps, overseas study tours, children's sports users and other parent services.
In the past month, quite a few sports promotion policies have been released. In early July, the State Council promoted policies to show that students who fail to meet the physical fitness standards in addition to sports-free students will not be allowed to receive diplomas. In addition, physical education subjects are included in the high school entrance examination scores. On July 23, the Ministry of Education released the National Youth Campus Football Work Report, which will pilot children's football and plan to build 3000 football-specific kindergartens.