Bengaluru-based education tech startup, IMAX Program, announced that it has raised $13.5 million from the Michael & Susan Dell foundation, LGT Impact Ventures, and the startup’s existing investor, Aspada.

The startup will employ the funds toward product innovation and expanding its consumer base via multiple distribution channels. It will also consider working with schools internationally. IMAX offers textbooks, workbooks, school exams, feedback reports and individualised remedial worksheets in addition to teacher manuals and teacher training modules. The startup caters to classes from kindergarten to Class 9 and is working with over 800 schools and 3,00,000 students across the country. It is aiming to reach a student base of 2 million by 2020. The startup’s program uses the exam data of the school to generate individualised remedial worksheets.

“We will use the funds for expanding our reach and also for product innovation. We presently cater to schools in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. We are looking to expand to Kerala, Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Almost 90 per cent of our schools are state board and mostly in tier 2 and tier 3 cities,” Varun Kumar, Co-founder, IMAX Program said.

IMAX Program was founded in 2009 by Varun Kumar and Naveen Mandava.  In 2015, the startup received funding of $1.8 million from Aspada.  The exam-remediation loop guarantees that the key gaps in learning are indentified and bridged, thereby making the learning process efficient and effective.

“We need models that leverage technology for applying data and analytics to improve learning outcomes for every student. However, there are genuine challenges in implementing such models due to variety in curriculum, pedagogy and assessments across multiple states in the country. IMAX Program’s full-stack learning system has demonstrated that it can achieve scale and be adopted successfully in schools,” Prachi Windlass, Director- India Programs, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation said.

The ed-tech space in India has lately seen numerous innovative and interesting models trying to impact the various touch points in a child’s study journey – from offering in-school solutions, tuitions to even providing hardware solutions. Byju’s, which is a major player in the Indian ed-tech space and IMAX’s main competitor, has so far raised over $240 million in funding. The startup’s other competitors include Unacademy, UCLID, Avagmah, Embibe, iProf, Meritnation, Englishleap, NeoStencil, and Toppr among others. According to a report by Google and KPMG, the online education space in India will grow by approximately 8 times over the next five years. This will have a huge impact on the ed-tech segment, which has the potential to touch $1.96 billion by 2021 from its current value at $247 million.

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