Kaizen Private Equity and Germany-based media company Bertelsmann have co-invested in WizIQ, an online education platform that offers software as a service (SaaS) based virtual classroom for teachers, trainers, colleges and universities and tutoring centers around the world.
WizIQ was earlier a wholly owned subsidiary of Educomp Online Supplemental Services (An Educomp Ltd Group Company).
This is the fifth investment by Kaizen and the first direct investment by Bertelsmann in India after the opening of a corporate center last year. The deal is worth 22 crore.
Bertelsmann's core divisions encompass television, book publishing, magazine publishing, and services in more than 50 countries.
“The concept of online collaborative learning is taking shape across the world and the market potential is quite significant. WizIQ addresses the need of both tutors to be able to teach remotely and students to access best teaching resources around the world. We see WizIQ addressing a multi-billion dollar market in the future,” said Sandeep Aneja, Founder and MD of Kaizen Private Equity.
WizIQ has over 2.5 million students and 2,00,000 tutors and is growing revenues at over 200% annually.
It provides easy to use tools for teachers to deliver education in online or blended learning formats, enables teachers to stay connected with their students, share educational content, deliver live online classes and facilitate highly engaging learning experiences among students.
WizIQ’s virtual classroom software works on desktop computers, iPad as well as Android tablets and can be customised for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew (right to left) and other languages like Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Polish, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Turkish.
WizIQ is also used for online teaching in colleges like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in India, Atlantic University in Virginia Beach and Des Moines Area Community Colleges in Iowa, USA, while being the virtual classroom software for tutoring companies like StudentNest in California, and TCY Online in India.
WizIQ is helping its customers create high-quality learning programs while keeping the costs low.
As a part of this investment, authorSTREAM, another online platform that PowerPoint users around the world use to share presentation based content, will merge into WizIQ.
With 4 million users using authorSTREAM and a lot of them being teachers, trainers and students, this merger will help WizIQ reach out to a much larger audience than it could just by itself.
With the help of the current round of funding, WizIQ is looking at strengthening its position as a collaborative learning platform for teachers and students.
“WizIQ’s vision is to enable anyone to teach or learn anytime and anyplace. This investment will take WizIQ a step closer to realising that vision," said Harman Singh, CEO and Founder, WiZiQ.com.
