China’s EdTech startup ClassIn raises $265 million in Series C funding to expand its online classroom platform

EEO Education, a Beijing-based EdTech startup and the owner of teaching platform ClassIn, today announced it has $256 million $265 million in Series C funding led by Hillhouse Ventures, followed by Tencent, SIG, Ince Capital, and Gaocheng Capital. The announcement comes just months after the company secured its over 50 million Series B round from Ince Capital in July.

ClassIn plans to use the new fresh capital injection to expand product R&D, develop new and advanced technologies in education, and explore more markets abroad increasing global reach while ensuring it maintains its leading position in the China market.

Founded in 2014 Junbo Song, ClassIn is an online teaching platform that enables teachers and students from across the globe to come together, face-to-face, and learn in a collaborative online environment. With a shared, interactive blackboard, a suite of essential teaching tools, and a cloud service that allows easy access to teaching materials, ClassIn has everything you need to create engaging classes online.

ClassIn’s primary product was released in 2017 and now upgraded to ClassIn X which helps to digitize offline classrooms, providing a connected, online-merge-offline learning experience. ClassIn supports a wide range of classroom sizes from 1 to 2000, allowing teachers and students to video chat, co-edit documents in real-time, deliver lectures and online presentations, hold group discussions, and more. ClassIn is highly adapted to a small-class scenario, ensuring the highest quality online learning experience and most cost-effective option for students and schools compared to 1-on-1 classes.

Since its inception, the ClassIn teaching platform has now served over 60,000 K12, university, and private sector clients, and is used by 20 million monthly active users (teachers and students) in 150 countries.

Designed to tackle head-on the lack of interactivity in online learning scenarios, ClassIn offers group video chat on top of a range of sophisticated interactive classroom settings and teaching features to create a fully interactive online learning experience that, combined with smart scheduling and quality teachers, can outperform the effect of traditional offline settings.

With over a dozen self-developed interactive tools and digital blackboard syncing technology, ClassIn creates a diversified interactive online classroom, which resembles the offline learning experience.

ClassIn is also the dominant online teaching platform in many of the world’s most prestigious universities, including Peking University in China, Cairo University in Egypt, Alcala University in Spain and Abu Dhabi University in the UAE. The Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, ALESCO, has listed it as a recommended remote teaching solution to all of its partner schools.

“We have dedicated a great deal of time and energy into developing our technologies and design to provide an online learning experience capable of surpassing the effect of a traditional classroom,” said Junbo Song, founder, and CEO of ClassIn.

“Amid the pandemic, we have made a tremendous impact that has led to a tremendous increase in our user volume.” ClassIn is also backed up by full courseware support in order to suit the needs of different classroom types and teaching scenarios, including blended learning and dual-teacher mode.

By way of its multi-channel video conferencing technology, 16 channels of audio and video, and comprehensive global deployment of cloud communication systems, ClassIn achieves global synchronization levels of up to 300ms ensuring near-zero latency, enabling teachers and students connecting to the platform from any network environment to realize a flawless interactive classroom experience.

ClassIn’s superior technical know-how and understanding in the field of online education has also brought formidable partners like Sony International Education and The British Council (organizer of the IELTS test) into the mix. The EdTech giant is now jointly developing a new interactive online learning platform with the former while providing tech support for the latter.

“ClassIn has created a first-rate, world-class product that I believe will ultimately reshape the entire world of education,” says Huang Liming, Partner of Hillhouse Ventures.

“ClassIn has opened our eyes to the future of education. Already, it has empowered tens of millions of students and teachers across the globe, while it will continue to create value and accelerate transformation in offline classrooms all over the world.”