RICH KID: The funding arms race to become the biggest online tutoring marketplace for English teachers is on. Beijing-based VIPKID, which launched its platform in 2014, has raised $500 million in funding led by Coatue Management, Tencent, Sequoia Capital and Yunfeng Capital.
The company is calling this a Series “D+” round, which comes on the heels of a $200 million Series D fundraise in August 2017. It’s a staggering infusion of capital—and one that it is clearly proud of: “VIPKID has received $700 million in financing in less than a year, rewriting the financing record for online education—twice in a row,” the company wrote in a press release.
This latest round gives VIPKID a $3+ billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, which reports that the company’s CEO, Cindy Mi, estimated the company would see about $750 million in revenue in 2017.
Within China, VIPKID has well-funded competitors, including Shanghai-based DaDaABC which raised $100 million in January 2018. 51Talk, another Beijing-based player in this space, had raised about $65 million before going public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2016.
VIPKID currently claims its live, one-on-one online tutoring platform is used by more than 40,000 American and Canadian teachers, and 300,000 students in China and 35 other countries.
