Walnut Knowledge Solutions(QShala), a company building out-of-school learning solutions for children, has raised Rs 2.7 crore funding led by Zerodha-backed fund Rainmatter Capital. Mindtree co-founder Kalyan Banerjee and former Director of Lowe Lintas Preeti Sawhney also participated in the funding round.
Founded in 2014 by Raghav Chakravarthy and Sachin Ravi, QShala is a curiosity platform that consists of live online courses designed to foster life-skills & pique the inquisitiveness of young minds through quizzes, stories & activities.
QShala was started as a predominantly offline space for hosting quizzes and other events in partnership with schools and students. In 2019, Walnut pivoted to providing its services online to build a more scalable platform.
“We started Walnut in 2014 and for six years we were primarily an offline platform. In 2019, we made the shift to an online platform and from then onwards we’ve really been focused on building that, which gave us the ability to scale through online live courses,” said Raghav Chakravarthy, cofounder at Walnut Knowledge Solutions.
The company said its move to providing online quizzes was accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, with its family quiz participants growing from over 50 families in March to 8,500 families today. It said it has seen a sixfold growth on its platform during the last few months as children and their parents were restricted to being indoors.
“Even with Zerodha, we’ve tried to teach people on how to trade rather than giving just stock tips. While this investment in QShala is outside whatever we do as a business, we thought that one of the best ways to enable curiosity building was when someone is a kid,” said Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO of Zerodha.
QShala said that it was actively looking to hire in the technology and marketing domain to expand its edtech platform, with the education and curriculum side of the business having been built out over the last six years. It says a sizeable chunk of its users come from outside large metros and some even from outside the country.
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