LingoAce, a Chinese language learning platform based in Singapore, said today that it has raised $105 million in a Series C investment round headed by Sequoia Capital India.
Owl Ventures, current investor Shunwei Capital, and SWC Global also joined the round, bringing the company’s total capital raised this year to $160 million.
This financing follows a US $55 million Series B round led by Tiger Global and Owl Ventures a few months ago, according to a release. This round was kept under wraps.
The fresh round takes the total funding garnered by the edutech business to $180 million since its inception.
It plans to use the new funds to expand its worldwide staff, with considerable recruiting taking place in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. A portion of the funds will go into improving curriculum and product development, as well as expanding sales and marketing assistance.
The organisation also intends to continue developing new English language programmes and investigate additional areas in order to address the worldwide need for education.
LingoAce is a customised and interactive learning platform founded by Hugh Yao in 2017. It boasts a staff of more than 4,000 professionally qualified instructors who are CTCSOL-accredited to teach Chinese to overseas students. These learning experiences are created in-house by LingoAce’s team of curriculum and education specialists, as well as multimedia, animation, and gamification experts, and are based on an internationally certified syllabus.
After a session, machine-enabled technology is used to evaluate the quality of the teaching and fine-tune the curriculum and learning experience. Live one-on-one and small-group lessons with professors offer real-time feedback and interaction to students.
The firm caters to kids aged four to fifteen years old, allowing its carefully selected professional Chinese teachers to provide lesson plans in real-time across physical borders in one-on-one and small group settings.
Lingo Ace now has a global presence in over 100 nations and regions.
During the COVID-19 crisis, the company saw a 4,000 percent increase in reservations worldwide. Since 2020, the firm has expanded over 2,000% in Southeast Asia, where 55% of users polled during the epidemic were utilising online education services for the first time.
“At LingoAce, we believe that the opportunity to learn a new language can unlock a world of possibilities for children,” said Hugh Yao, CEO and Founder of LingoAce. “With the backing of our investors, we plan to continue to scale our platform to reach more audiences and ensure that more children across the globe will continue to have access to quality online educational experiences.”
LingoAce has more than quadrupled its staff in Singapore this year, from 60 to 120. Marshall Roslyn, the CFO and chief strategy officer, is one of the notable new additions. Goh Aik Chuan, a former associate GM at Uber, has also joined the edtech firm as GM (Southeast Asia). Chuan will be in charge of LingoAce’s regional expansion, with an emphasis on Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand. Abheek Anand, MD of Sequoia India, and Ian Chiu, MD of Owl Ventures, will join the board of LingoAce as part of the investment rounds. Dennis Yang, the former CEO of Udemy, has joined the advisory board of LingoAce.
