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kindrik partners advises edtech startup shikho on US$1.3m seed round
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Kindrik Partners recently advised Shikho, an edtech startup focused on making education accessible and affordable for Bangladeshi students, on its $1.3million seed funding round.
LearnStart, the seed fund of Silicon Valley-based edtech investment fund Learn Capital, and Anchorless Bangladesh, a New York-based early-stage venture capital firm, led the round. It also had participation from Wavemaker and Ankgur Nagpal, founder and CEO of online platform Teachable. The company previously raised $275,000 in pre-seed financing from LearnStart and other angel investors.
The content on the Shikho platform is based on the Bangladeshi National Curriculum and features animated video lessons, interactive live classes, and continuous assessment. It also includes gamification techniques such as point-scoring systems and leaderboards, where students can measure their performance against users at their school, or across the entire app.
The company was founded in April 2019 by CEO Shahir Chowdhury and COO Zeeshan Zakaria. The pair previously worked in finance but both have connections to the education sector – both Chowdhury’s parents were teachers, and Zakaria pivoted from finance to teaching mathematics.
Shikho plans to use the funds to continue hiring edtech talent and accelerating content and technology development, in addition to focusing on user acquisition, including offline sales teams for school wide presence.
Partner Lee Bagshaw says of the deal, “the market opportunity for Shikho is massive and they’re poised to take the lead in remote learning in Bangladesh and beyond – it was a pleasure to work with them on this deal.”
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Kindrik Partners advised VC firm Illuminate Financial on its investment in Singapore-based AI-driven data processing and automation company bluesheets. Illuminate led the US$6.5 million series A round. Other returning investors included Insignia Ventures Partners, Antler Elevate, and 1982 Ventures.
Illuminate invests in B2B fintech and enterprise software companies that build solutions for the financial services industry. Backed by global financial institutions such as Citi, JP Morgan, Barclays, Jefferies, Singapore Exchange Group, and BNY Mellon, Illuminate uses its extensive network and industry knowledge to help their portfolio companies achieve their full potential in addition to providing capital.
bluesheets offers AI-driven data processing and workflow automation software that helps businesses digitise and automate their bookkeeping processes. It plans to use the funds to further enhance its AI capabilities and accelerate growth in key APAC markets, including Singapore, Thailand, ANZ, and Hong Kong.
We’re happy to have advised Singapore-based synthetic data company Betterdata on an oversubscribed seed round of $1.65 million, led by Investible.
The company was founded in 2021 by Dr. Uzair Javaid and Kevin Yee and allows clients to share data faster and more securely in compliance with stricter data privacy regulations being introduced around the world. Betterdata uses generative AI to convert real data into synthetic data that looks, feels, and behaves like real datasets. These synthetic datasets retain the structure and correlations of the original data while eliminating the privacy and security concerns that come with holding and sharing sensitive data.
Betterdata plans to use the funding to publicly launch its product, hire more staff as the company scales, and improve its technology stack, with the aim of providing support for single-table, multi-table, and time-series datasets. The company also plans to expand across the Asia-Pacific region over the next two years.
