It was only earlier this week that we learned StudyFree — which connects students with international educational opportunities — had raised a $3 million seed round. But there’s more to this than being accepted on a traditional course. The pandemic has turned education into a remote industry, and tech startups have responded.
Educate Online is a platform allowing international students to study at U.K., U.S. and Canadian schools, but there’s a twist. All the study is done online, remotely, full time or part time, without having to move to another country and bear the related costs.
It’s now raised $4 million in seed funding from Xploration Capital, TMT Investments, Flyer One Ventures, Softline and Angelsdeck.
In the past 12 months, the startup says it’s garnered 2,500 students from 18 countries, covering K-12 study, ESOL, career exploration, university preparation, and internship and mentorship programs.
The platform also offers options for students to participate in on-campus summer or semester programs. It now plans to scale in LatAm, Asia and the Middle East.
Competitors include agencies that are still focused on offline education such as Transitions Abroad, Smapse and Academic Families.
Alexander Zheltov, co-founder and CEO of Educate Online, said:
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. After COVID-19 hit, we made a hard pivot to online education as we were seeing a surge of interest toward online education — in 2020 we grew 5.5x and we expect to continue growing 3-5x year over year.
Eugene Timko, managing partner at Xploration Capital said:
Schools have historically been very local operations. Few have branched out to other countries, primarily through building foreign campuses and local partnerships. 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.