Ascend Vietnam Ventures (AVV), a venture capital firm based in Vietnam, led a $1 million seed round that was raised by Cerebry, an artificial intelligence (AI) edtech startup based in Singapore.
Pentathlon Ventures and strategic investors also participated in the funding round, according to a statement from Cerebry.
With the money, Cerebry intends to keep growing its AI-powered practice platform and provide millions of K–12 students in Asia Pacific (APAC) with adaptive learning opportunities.
The company intends to expand into new fields like science in order to further develop their product.
Additionally, Cerebry plans to increase the size of its clientele by entering new markets like Vietnam and Japan.
“We already see an average student solve more than 150 problems monthly on Cerebry outside of the classroom,
“They would not be engaging with subjects like math at home otherwise,” said Shubham Goyal, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Cerebry.
With the entire cohort in a school, he claims this allows the firm to achieve a median score improvement of up to 37 percent.
“The problem we are solving is worthwhile; I am optimistic that we will reach a future where economic or geographic barriers do not stop a kid from realizing their dream,” he added.
For K–12 and beyond, Cerebry is an AI-based solution for practice, evaluation, and remediation.
The company replaces static educational content with dynamically auto-generating adaptive exercises for students in collaboration with educators, publishers, and other edtech companies.
Students can now learn and practice with problem sets that are tailored to their specific learning needs through the use of its AI engine. These problem sets include step-by-step problem breakdown, problem-solving, and additional practice with immediate, personalized assistance in the form of hints and feedback.
These greatly contribute to raising student engagement and learning outcomes.
With clients including governments in Southeast Asia (SEA) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), publishers like Marshall Cavendish, and several edtech companies in India like IMS Learning (the country’s largest CAT prep center chain) and Jamboree (the country’s largest GMAT prep center chain), the company has seen a ten-fold increase in revenue growth in 2022 and near-perfect retention across various customer segments.
The edtech company began with math for secondary schools and turned a profit in 2022.
After the pandemic, some edtech companies have seen a decrease in usage and retention; however, Cerebry has seen an increase in schools adopting their platform.
The three men in charge of Cerebry are Shubham Goyal, Rahul Singhal, and Rohit Singhal. They have a solid background in engineering and have led both early- and growth-stage startups before.
