Ed-tech start-up Makkajai Edu Tech Pvt. Ltd on September 7, said it has raised $250,000 from Ananth Narayanan, Chief Executive of Myntra; Anand Chandrasekaran, former Chief Product Officer of Snapdeal; Mekin Maheshwari, former Chief People Officer of Flipkart; Ravi Garikipati, Head of Engineering Flipkart; among others.
The deal was conducted through deal-making platform LetsVenture. The company will utilise the funds to expand its team.
Pune-based Makkajai was founded in July 2014 by Roopesh Shenoy (Chief Executive), Vinayak Palankar (Chief Marketing Officer), Deep Shah (Chief Technology Officer) and Abhishek Awadhani (Chief Business Officer).
It combines education-based games and learning analytics to create an adaptive learning platform. The company builds an end-to-end curriculum of educational games. The games also contain reporting features, thereby giving parents and teachers a real-time view of the student’s progress and his strengths and weaknesses.
The company has launched three games so far—Monster Math Classic, Monster Math and Monster Math Duels.
“What makes Makkajai unique is the use of design thinking methodology in building educational games, resulting in Monster Math being used by over 500 schools and 300,000 parents across the world. Through this, we are solving the two most pressing problems in the education system—low engagement and lack of personalization,” said Palankar.
“Improving education is a global problem and we need global collaboration to solve it effectively. Hence, we have a team that is spread across the globe and we are working hard to make learning fun and effective. The current fund-raise will help our team in reaching our goals—specifically in terms of scaling our US and India business,” he added.
Across all the games, Makkajai has over 1.5 million downloads. The monthly active users number around 100,000.
“The start-up has recruited some of the best gaming simulation and character folks who are raising the bar on the quality of games,” said Chandrasekaran.
Source: Mint
