TED NewsDesk, BENGALURU: Bengaluru-based Newton School on Tuesday announced that it has raised $650,000 in a seed round of funding led by early-stage venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners. It provides full-stack online coding courses and has now joined the list of edtech startups that are raking in benefits from an increased investor appetite in the Edtech fundraising front this year.
According to a statement by the startup, Newton School will be using the capital to strengthen its product and expand its team. The startup has raised $650,000, so far, in early-stage funding led by venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners. The funding round also saw participation from Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, co-founders at Unacademy; founder of U.S.-based startup platform AngelList; Srinivas Anumolu, founder of Upwork; veteran educationists Ajay Gupta and Sahil Aggarwal; and Growth Story founder K Ganesh.
Nishant Chandra, Co-Founder at Newton School, said, “Millions of students every year go to engineering colleges with outdated curriculums which teach coding using pen and paper and have little relevance to industry requirements. This results in a meagre three per cent employability for new-age jobs even after spending lakhs of rupees. Newton School has developed interactive products and curriculum that allow students to practice coding and get instant feedback, build live industry-oriented projects, and get it reviewed by top software developers, making them ready for high paying jobs.”
“With the product and community first thinking, within the first few months of execution, Newton School is showing great results and creating meaningful impact in lives of software engineering graduates and making hiring of great tech talent easier for companies. We look forward to the journey with Newton School where they are building an online academy and solving the deep problem of employability of graduates,” added Pratik Poddar, Principal, Nexus Venture Partners.
While the placements at colleges virtually came to a standstill because of COVID-19 restrictions, according to the startup, its first batch from the ongoing year recently graduated with a whopping 90% placement rate. This is owed partly to alumni working in top companies like Unacademy, Rapido, Toppr, among others.
The Edtech startup aims to have 10,000 students placed by 2021. It also hosts monthly Newton’s coding challenges and free courses for new, as well as existing students. Founded in 2019 by serial entrepreneurs and college friends Nishant Chandra and Siddharth Maheshwari, Newton School is an online edtech platform which aims to train people with technical skills and get them placed in top companies and startups as frontend, backend, and full-stack software developers among other roles. It assists students in landing dream jobs after their academic tenures.