Singapore has repeatedly been placed in the top 5 highly ranked countries in the world related to educational outcomes. EdTech industry has been growing rapidly and Singapore itself has seen growth in this sector. According to Shivanu Shukla, CEO, and co-founder of EdTech firm Teamie “EdTech in Singapore has evolved. In the early days, it was limited to online content access. Today, EdTech has grown to include learner data analysis, gamification, social learning, and personalized learning solutions to help students learn more efficiently”. There are many opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs to capitalize on EdTech’s growing demand both within and outside the country’s borders. Those looking to start an EdTech venture in Singapore stand to benefit by establishing themselves as early as possible before the field gets saturated. EdTech is a maturing industry in Singapore that is exploding with opportunities. As learning moves beyond the classroom, EdTech applications in Singapore will appeal to increasing segments of the community as they embrace lifelong learning. It is up to us to provide personalized, targeted solutions that enhance their learning experience.
With so many startups in the EdTech industry, we’ve put together a list of exciting startups to keep an eye in the coming years. Each doing amazing things in their own right, here we present Top 20 Singaporean EdTech Startups to explore in 2021.
- XSEED
XSEED is engaged in providing an academic program for schools for developing thinking and problem-solving skills in students. It provides training for teachers, provides children with practice workbooks and ‘MAX’, a weekly digital learning class in science and maths. The XSEED program has reached around 2 million students and has active 300 teachers. The XSEED method has been implemented by 3000 schools across India, the Philippines, Dubai, Riyadh, Qatar, Nepal, and Oman. It has even partnered with the Royal Education Council in Bhutan.
2. Cialfo
Cialfo is a developer of a student management program that aims to manage the applications of students for boarding schools, undergraduate and post-graduate programs. It helps the independent college counselors, private organizations, and high schools to manage their overseas college application process, thus giving a chance to the counselors to automate workflows, improve student and parent engagement and simplify team collaboration throughout the college planning process. It is a cloud-based resource planning management solution provider for schools. It has 10000 users in more than 40 countries including China, India, Singapore and aims to have 100 million students using the platform by 2025. Investors are Seed Capital, Loy Teik Ngan, Vulcan Capital, Enterprise Singapore, January Capital, Bisk Ventures, DLF Venture, Alto Partner (Singapore).
3. Knowledge Platform
Knowledge Platform is one of Asia-Pacific’s leading ‘next-generation learning solution companies’. It provides holistic learning solutions to the students in the form of strategy, content, technology, and support. It provides e-learning and blended learning training programs for educational, corporate, and government companies. The content of the company includes videos, games, assignments, clickers, and assessments. Games like Mind Tussle are included which helps in training of the brain. It also has Factor Monster, which is a maths learning platform. It has been working in 20+ countries and has instructor training programs in China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Qatar, Singapore, and Brunei. It has 1800 courses developed since 2000, has 500K learners, and has trained 3700+ teachers up to date.
4. Amdon
Amdon provides interactive content and inquiry-based pedagogical resources. It provides learning content and solutions for science and engineering, personalized learning expertise. It develops digital teaching resources and implements training programs for both students and professionals globally. It has been listed as the “10 Most Promising Education Technology Solution Provider in 2016”. It has more than 80 employees and has offices in Singapore, the US, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Myanmar.
5.Tigerhall
Tigerhall is defined as the knowledge-sharing platform which aims to attract people towards success. The platform connects users with influential people via in-person, podcasts, power reads, and personal mentoring sessions, thus helping users to reach their personal and professional goals. It directly links the brightest minds in the industry to ones aspiring to become one. Its app is available for both Android and iOS. Investors are Taurus Ventures, XA Network, WDHB, Sequoia Capital, Paladigm Capital, Surge (Accelerator). Funding Received of USD 4 million.
6. Gnowbe
Gnowbe is a mobile-only microlearning app that is available on both Android and iOS. It provides bite-sized content i.e., 10-15 minutes per day, and has experiential learning actions using multiple media like peer-to-peer learning, personal reflections, team chats, videos, articles to enhance more deep learning. It believes that learning should be done through practice and application. One program normally takes 10-15 minutes a day and on average of 1-2 months. Companies also use this app to empower employees by developing engaging, interesting, and informative content through culture and morale. It has a SaaS platform and last year launched a digital content library of micro courses, to which 15000 individuals have registered.
7. Tueetor
Tueetor is a discovery platform for tutors. It provides a platform where students find tutors and trainers based on subject, level, qualification, experience, budget, location. The experts available are for academic subjects as well as nonacademic subjects like sports, art, music, dance. The source of revenue for Tueetor is the T-pak, which is provided free for the first mouth to Tutors to manage tuition, and then a subscription price is charged. It has increased its platform from 500 tutors to over 16000 tutors up to date. More than 50000 students use it per month and it is available in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Investors were Noppadon Narittakurn and iGroup. Funding Received worth USD 1.5 million.
8. Teamie
Teamie is an online educational platform which aims to teach the power of collaborative learning in school, colleges, and universities. It aims at working and learning together through structured social networks. It helps in creating a network between students, teachers, parents, management and helps in learning by providing the required tools. It provides online quizzes, grade books, content sharing, and features like online classrooms, study groups, bulletin boards, and locker rooms. It is a cloud-based platform that is engaged in improving the learning process by understanding what the end-users demand. It is developing apps for both Android and iOS. Within 2 years of its formation, it had reached the benchmark of 500000 users. It has customers in South East Asia, Hong Kong, and Australia and users across 10 countries in Asia Pacific.
9. Geniebook
Geniebook is an online, assessment -led learning tool that provides a powerful way to improve and sharpen the academic performance of the students. It provides a digital platform for students to learn, where it can identify the weak areas of the child and then work upon them by generating the targeted questions. It covers subjects like Maths, English, and Science and gives the platform to the students to improve their speed by practicing questions at their own pace. It serves more than an100000 users. The team of Geniebook is diverse and has over 200 people with offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Investor is Apricot Capital and Funding Received worth USD 1 million .
10. ACKTEC Technologies
ACKTEC Technologies is an operator of virtual reality platforms which aims to provide professional development to the teaching staff, educators, and trainers. It uses augmented reality, AI Virtual Assistance, AI Predictive Analytics, and 3D animation to give an engaging experience full of learning for the corporates and training institutions. It has products that include “ACKTEC Learn” which aims at providing a learning platform, “ACKETC Class” which provides a learning management system, and “KQwest” which provides an online training marketplace. It has over 705000 active learners of different industries like transportation, education, and finance in over 16 countries.
11. Emeritus
Emeritus is committed to teaching the skills of the future by making high-quality education accessible and affordable to individuals, companies, and governments around the world. It does this by collaborating with more than 50 top-tier universities across the United States, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, India and China. Emeritus’ short courses, degree programs, professional certificates, and senior executive programs help individuals learn new skills and transform their lives, companies and organizations. Its unique model of state-of-the-art technology, curriculum innovation, and hands-on instruction from senior faculty, mentors and coaches has educated more than 250,000 individuals across 80 countries. Founded in 2015, Emeritus, part of the Eruditus Group has more than 1,400 employees globally and offices in Mumbai, New Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore, Palo Alto, Mexico City, New York, Boston, London, and Dubai.
12. Nas Academy
The one stop academy to learn the skills of the future. They provide highly-engaging courses across content creation, art, business, crypto currency and many more. They provide never-before learning experience to people across 140 countries. Headquartered in Singapore, they offer a range of courses that cover the new-age skills required to tackle the changing job and media landscape. Nas Academy has raised a total of $11M in funding over 1 round. This was a Series A round raised on Jul 13, 2021. Nas Academy is funded by 14 investors. Markian Benhamou and Emilie Choi are the most recent investors. They are on a mission to empower Creators through technology. Starting with education.
13. DIY.org
DIY is a learning platform to help kids in their most formative years between 5 and 16. Watching children learn, create and share while inspiring other kids to develop their skills has become the most enriching experience on the platform. DIY is already bringing joy to thousands of kids and parents across the world while promoting positive and good screen time. An average DIYer spends 7 hours 43 minutes offline doing activities and projects to share back to the platform. 50+ COURSES & TV SHOWS Structured courses & learning based shows provide pathways for the most common interests. They also promote a culture that encourages learning by doing, and failing, and growing. 3600+ PROJECTS A library of thousands of different creative and activity-based projects spanning hundreds of topics to cover all interests and ages. 160+SKILLSBig scary skills are broken down into bite-sized projects and demonstrated through easy-to-follow hands-on visual media.
14. NewCampus
NewCampus is an education and technology company providing accessible business education for modern leaders everywhere. NewCampus grows leaders who scale themselves. They connect diverse people with sharp minds, open hearts and big ambitions to solve humanity-scale challenges, no matter where they come from. Their cohort-based learning programs are designed for hyper-growth companies seeking to scale their teams, systems and culture without sacrificing their humanity. They partner with giants of the future, organisations with courageous leaders who influence culture, create strategy and shape the prosperity of their communities, cities and beyond. Deep learning is at the heart of NewCampus, with personal reflection, best-practice frameworks, wise mentors and abundant opportunities for application to ensure lessons are integrated into the business community and practiced for life.
15. Flying Cape
Flying Cape is an EdTech firm that is developing a global distribution system for learners and education providers. Flying Cape is an online booking and advisory platform for tuition and enrichment classes in Singapore. Working with academics from all over the world, they offer tried and tested advisory tools that can help their customers find the right classes based on their unique needs. As education service providers, their priority is to reach out and connect to families to support them on their learning journey. They work together to focus on the providing the best services they can to their customer.
16. Genius Group Ltd
Genius Group is a global education company with 2 million students in 200 countries. They are developing a future focused, entrepreneur education system that spans from early learning, primary and secondary school, through to university, adult education and corporate training. As part of the United Nations Global Compact, they are connecting students, teachers, leaders, entrepreneurs and changemakers with the tools and global community they need to achieve positive, measurable impact towards the 17 United Nations Global Goals. They believe that it is the entrepreneurs of the world who have the power to carry forth the transformational change necessary for the future. They are disrupting the education system and bringing forth a more relevant curriculum that prepares students of all ages and skill levels to be impactful changemakers. Instead of training people to “get a job” as an employee, they show others how to forge their own path, ignite their own genius, and design a life of their dreams.
17. JULES CORPORATION
Jules Corporation Pvt Ltd (“JULES”) is a Singapore Social-Enterprise and award-winning global software Education Technology (“EdTech”) company, We face a global learning crisis as our 200 years old knowledge-based education is obsolete and unable to cope with the jobs disruption driven by advancing technology. By 2030 more than 500 million children will enter the education system. We need to re-shape how we educate this next generation NOW to become future-ready. They believe that the greatest impact will be to enable our youngest minds with new “thinking and digital skills” for the 21st century. Hence they have created the “School of Fish”- the World’s 1st B2B Digital Literacy curriculum teaching “Computational Thinking” in both classroom and online environment to Children ages 4 to 8 years old. “School of Fish” offers a full curriculum with complete lesson plans; combining innovative pedagogies through gamification and 3D animation to engage the child; technology empowerment through use of mobile APP-based learning; enabling “non-technical” teachers to deliver consistent quality lessons; scalability and easy deployment facilitated by a comprehensive training and support platform School of Fish is the first Singapore EdTech that has won multiple global awards recognizing their unique value proposition- IMS Global Learning Award 2019- Category Simulation & Immersive Learning, World Summit Award 2019 in Learning & Education as well as Bett Global EdTech Startup Award in Jan 2020; and has impacted 10,000 children, taught >50,000 hours of lessons, trained 150 teachers across 50 schools in Singapore and China.
18. EWA Learn English
EWA Learn English is an innovative method of learning a language. EWA started only in 2017 and skyrocketed to the very top charts in the Apple store and Google play surpassing well funded and long ago established competitors. The success of EWA based on combining fun, deep motivation, and unique learning techniques. The platform now has iOS, Android, and Web versions with more than 40 million users globally. EWA Learn English has raised a total of $1.5M in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Oct 31, 2021 from a Convertible Note round. EWA Learn English is funded by SmartHub. EWA Learn English uses 13 technology products and services including HTML5, Google Analytics, and Google Fonts, according to G2 Stack. EWA Learn English is actively using 18 technologies for its website, according to BuiltWith. These include LetsEncrypt, WordPress, and Font Awesome.
19. Doyobi
Doyobi is built by teachers for teachers. They are a team of learning experience designers, software engineers, community managers and product marketers focused on getting teachers to see learning through the eyes of their learners. What is your purpose To make a difference by helping kids find their sense of purpose. Doyobi develops STEM and 21st century skills content delivered on a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with built-in learning tools. The VLE enables teachers to make students full participants in their own educational journey through active learning that provides inquiry and experience-based learning with applications in the real world, uses interactive media to allow learners to make crucial links across concepts, gets learners cognitively engaged by building projects using Scratch.
20. ZaZaZu
ZaZaZu is a discreet e-commerce platform to guide women to explore, experiment and enhance their sexual journey through education, consultation and curation of products based on individual needs. They aim to normalize sexual wellness for every woman in daily life, empower them to own their pleasure and create a safe space to exchange, learn and explore 360° around sexuality and intimacy. ZaZaZu has raised a total of $135K in funding over 1 round. This was a Pre-Seed round raised on Jul 1, 2020. ZaZaZu is funded by 3 investors. Neil Bearden and Loyal VC are the most recent investors.
For any corrections/nominations kindly contact aasma@startuplanes.com