Moscow-based e-learning startup YaKlass has announced that it has secured a seed funding round from Latvia’s Data Pro Group, Russia’s Vesna Investment and entrepreneur Nikita Khalyavin, CNews.ru revealed last week.
The amount of the investment has not been disclosed, but CEO Valeriy Nikitin told East-West Digital News that it valued YaKlass at $2 million.
YaKlass is a distance learning startup aimed at the Russian market, providing users with theoretical content and allowing them to generate problems for students with different answers. In the fields of mathematics and Russian language YaKlass currently offers more than 200,000 content units and 3,000 problems with 1.5 million variations.
The YaKlass educational portal works on Genexis, an international platform which has been developed since 2008 by several organizations, including Data Pro Group, one of the funding round participants.
The investment will be used to create new e-learning content and improve portal functionality, Nikitin told EWDN. He added that over the first three weeks of May the website attracted more than 100,000 visitors.
YaKlass is planning to create online tools for preparation for the Unified State Exam that all Russian students have to take when completing secondary school. After introducing this functionality the startup will expand to Spanish- and English-speaking markets.
The YaKlass team already has experience working abroad. “We have a similar project in Latvia and we have also participated in several European projects,” Nikitin said.
E-learning is a trendy area for investors in Russia. In April of this year Eduson launched internationally after receiving $1 million in funding. In October 2012 the Moscow Seed Fund pumped $300,000 into TeachBase, a startup offering corporate e-learning and knowledge management services. One year ago, Lingualeo, a Russian startup with a web service that teaches English using popular TV series, books and contextual dialogues, raised $3 million from Runa Capital.
