YC-backed Codingal raises $1.2 Mn in seed round

BENGALURU: Codingal, a coding platform for students, on Wednesday said it has raised $1.2 million as a part of its seed funding round, led by Y Combinator, Summer Capital, Day One Syndicate, and Rebright Partners.

Prominent angel investors including Nate Lipscomb, senior product counsel, Youtube; Ganesh Rengaswamy, managing partner, Quona Capital, and Peter Weck, co-founder, Simply Hired also participated in the round.

According to the edtech, it will utilise the fresh funds to grow, nurture and empower the company’s rapidly growing community of kindergarten to grade 12 students and teachers. The funds will also be used to develop their proprietary platform for an improved and personalised learning experience.

The startup aims to add 500,000 new students to its platform over the next 12 months.

“Our mission is to inspire school kids to fall in love with coding, and we are building Codingal to deliver high-quality computer science education combined with world-class coding competitions. Codingal plans to build a robust passion economy marketplace for coding education that brings together the best-in-class educators and students who are eager to learn to code,” said Vivek Prakash, co-founder and chief executive officer of Codingal.

According to the company, it has grown 30% month-on-month since its launch in September 2020, and currently generates over 20% revenue from international customers.

“Education technology is not only bringing much-needed digitalization to the education sector but it is also facilitating remote learning for thousands of children in nooks and corners of the country. I believe it is the future. Codingal has made an impressive impact in the less than one year since its inception and it is already showing its strong potential to create transformational opportunities for students and teachers across India,” said Lipscomb.

In less than a year of its launch, Codingal has offered over 100,000 students from more than 5,000 schools a platform to learn coding. It holds community-led coding competitions and live one-on-one classes on its platform.

“We have also hosted over 100 coding competitions so far and received over 100,000 project and code submissions by students on the Codingal platform. It is heartening to witness the inception and growth of a thriving community of students, parents, and highly trained teachers interested in coding,” said Satyam Baranwal, co-founder and chief operating officer of Codingal.

The startup has partnered with reputed educational institutions and technology companies to host coding competitions and promote coding culture among school students. Its education partners include the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IIT Roorkee, IIT Guwahati, BITS Pilani, among others

Prior to this, Codingal had raised an angel round of $560,000 in November 2020. Early in 2021, Codingal was also accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.