Unreasonable Capital invests in education tech start-up

Mumbai: US-based Unreasonable Capital, an early stage investor focused on emerging markets has made its maiden foray into Asia with an investment in a research-based education tech company India called Stones2Milestones.

Piyush Shah, co-founder at InMobi, also participated in the current round of funding, Stones2Milestones said, without disclosing financial details of the transaction.

Unreasonable Capital, an impact investor, typically invests in sectors such as clean energy, financial technologies, innovations in agriculture and artisan-driven fashion.

Founded in 2008, Gurugram-based Stone2Milestones aims to encourage reading among school going children aged 3-9 years using technology products. The start-up integrates its program with the early school curriculum. So far the company has reached 100,000 children and about 1,000 teachers as part of its mission, it said.

“Creating awareness, diagnosing reading gaps and making reading abilities a strong part of our dinner table conversations is the first step to taking action. Currently, the country doesn’t have any reading level benchmarks and we are attempting to change that by taking the FAST assessment, from 100 schools last year to 1.5 million children in the next 12 months,” said Aditi Mehta, co-author at Stones2Milestones.

FAST is a English reading skill assessment conducted by the company for school children from grades 4-6.

“Dr. E S Rao, current chairman at Industrial Finance Corporation of India (IFCI) is another investor in the startup