Marathon Education Founder and CEO Duc Pham
Vietnam’s Marathon Education has added more funding to its seed financing round led by Vulcan Capital, the startup said in a statement.
Forge Ventures, DSG Consumer Partners, Goodwater Capital, and other unnamed angels also participated.
While Marathon Education refused to disclose the amount, a source told e27 the edutech firm raised a seven-figure USD from this round.
The round follows Marathon Education’s participation in the Y Combinator accelerator programme and a 30 per cent monthly growth rate in the first year of operations.
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A year earlier, it bagged US$1.5 million from Forge Ventures, Venturra, and iSeed SEA.
With the new capital, the edutech firm will ramp up its focus on product development in 2023. It plans to launch programming courses and improve the current technology offering to improve students’ academic performance during and beyond live classes, particularly in the virtual classroom experience and out-of-class adaptive learning and performance analysis.
Marathon Education will also look to expand its “online-to-offline” experience centres beyond Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to provide an opportunity for parents and students to experience the immersive live-class experience anywhere in Vietnam.
While focused on scaling, the firm will also maintain unit-economics profitability.
Co-founded in 2021 by Duc Pham (CEO), an ex-investor at TPG Global, and his brother-in-law Tran Viet Tung (COO), Marathon Education provides live interactive cohort-based classes in large- or small-class format to K-12 students in Vietnam.
Pham says the company has quickly grown to work with 30 “star” tutors nationally, with an average of 20 years of experience providing test preparation classes to top students in Vietnam and hundreds of individual tutors.
Currently, the platform makes accessible all subjects supplementary to the Ministry of Education’s curriculum. In Q3 this year, Marathon started offering IELTS and English language lessons in small-class format taught by exclusively English native teachers.
Despite being a large market with US$2bn of annual revenue driven by parents’ intense focus on children’s education, online penetration in Vietnam’s K-12 afterschool education market is low at 3 per cent.
Also Read: BrightCHAMPS acquires SEA-focused edutech startup Schola for US$15M
The offline market remains fragmented and faces key issues, including the inaccessibility of top teachers to students nationally, inconsistent quality, low brand trust, and lack of application of technology in delivering personalised learning and improving academic performance.
In August, Vietnamese startup Schola, a live-learning platform for kids to master communication and English skills, was acquired by Indian edutech company BrightCHAMPS in a US$15-million cash and stock deal.
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