Europe’s newest Edech unicorn: Austria’s GoStudent raises €205M from SoftBank, Tencent, others; will double its team by 2021-end

Vienna, Austria-based GoStudent, an edtech startup has announced that it has achieved unicorn status in less than 2.5 years after finding its current business model. The startup hit this milestone after €205M in its Series C round of funding.

This comes just months after the startup raised €70M in its Series B round of funding. Including the current round, GoStudent has now raised a total of over €291M in funding, to date. The company also claims to have become the highest valued K12 edtech company in Europe.

The Series C round was led by DST Global with participation from additional new investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tencent, and Dragoneer. Besides, existing investors including Coatue, Left Lane Capital, and DN Capital also invested in this round.

Capital for expansion

Currently present in 15 countries, the raised funding will primarily be used to further expand GoStudent’s services globally.

In the past few months, the company has witnessed rapid growth. It expanded its team to more than 500 employees, and has opened 12 offices, including new locations in Amsterdam, Athens, and Istanbul. And, the company says it looks forward to continuing to strengthen its position as the market leader for K12 online tutoring in Europe.

In addition to further developing its presence in Europe, GoStudent will also be expanding overseas and plans to launch in Mexico and Canada this summer. Besides, the scale-up will also invest in branding, product development, and first acquisitions.

“Future of tutoring”

Founded by Felix Ohswald and Gregor Müller in 2016, GoStudent’s vision is to help students reach their full potential and replace traditional tutoring through innovative online teaching. The startup offers a digital learning platform for online teaching and paid individual courses for all school subjects. 

Through its platform, GoStudent provides paid, one-to-one, video-based tuition to primary, secondary and college-aged students in more than 20 subjects, using a membership model. GoStudent works with 5,500 tutors and has opened 12 international offices. 

GoStudent reports growth of approx 30 per cent month-over-month and books more than 400,000 tutoring sessions each month. By the end of 2021, the platform aims to be present in over 20 countries and looks to double its team to more than 1,000 employees as well as 10,000 tutors.

Speaking on the development, Gregor Müller, co-founder and COO of GoStudent says, “By connecting every student with their ideal teacher we solve the fundamental problem of lacking access to top teachers and, in turn, we make affordable, high-quality education widely available.”