Singapore-based T-Lab raised East Ventures led US $1.6 M in seed funding round

T-Lab, a Singapore-based edtech firm, revealed today that it has raised US $1.6 million in seed investment. The investment round was led by East Ventures, with participation from K3 Ventures, Blue Elephant Capital, and Plug & Play.

The money will be utilised to boost T-research Lab’s and development division and improve the curriculum for offering high-quality Chinese language instructional resources, according to a news release. It also wants to expand its user base and improve its goods.

T-Lab is an education technology company that teaches Chinese to students in the United States and Southeast Asia. In 2021, the company unveiled its T-Lab Linnet Chinese platform, claiming to be one of the first AI+Live course teaching systems in the world.

It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the online learning experience for K-12 students, T-Lab instructors, and parents. The goal of AI gamification education is to pique students’ interests and allow them to enjoy and participate in the courses.

T-Lab also has an Education Research Team, which is made up of foreign Chinese instructors, and a Teaching Team, which is made up of academics that specialise in Chinese language at prestigious universities like Peking University and Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Gin Zhang and Phillip Zhao, the business’s co-founders, founded the company after noticing a “severe Chinese language resource and market dislocation worldwide.”

“As of 2018, the number of Chinese learners worldwide has reached 180 million and kept growing up to 14.2 percent annually, while 95 percent of qualified Chinese teachers are mainly located in Mainland China. Therefore, offline Chinese teaching institutions cannot meet students’ needs in terms of quantity or quality. Students get poor learning experiences and learning results at a high cost,” the company stated.

“Each region has different learning expectations. Meanwhile, offline and online learning institutions still lack authoritative professional experts to formulate, research, and develop a complete system of teaching models for different national markets. Despite the mushrooming of online Chinese teaching institutes nowadays, there are still very few applications with AI courses that interact with students’ individual learning needs,” said Zhang.