Prosus is taking another stab at making its mark in the education sector, backing Indian AI-based tutoring platform Arivihan through a R75m funding round.
The group’s bets on education technology (edtech) have taken a hit in recent years. CEO Fabricio Bloisi will be hoping that his focus on AI will help to breathe new life and growth into this part of its sprawling R2-trillion internet portfolio.
This week, Arivihan, which offers AI-powered personalised coaching for school students, said it had raised $4.17m (R75m) in a preseries A funding round, led by Prosus and Accel, with participation from GSF Investors.
The company earlier raised $750,000 in a previous round from Accel Atoms, a sector-focused preseed programme by venture capital firm Accel in India.
According to Naspers’ international unit, Arivihan is “India’s first AI-powered learning platform”.
Founded by Ritesh Singh Chandel, Sonu Kumar and Rushabh Kothari in 2024, Arivihan has developed “India’s first fully automated AI tutoring platform that delivers personalised coaching through interactive video lectures, instant doubt-solving, and AI-driven study plans”.
By removing dependence on live teachers, the platform achieves 10 times greater scalability and cost-effectiveness compared with traditional coaching models, “making quality education accessible to students across India’s underserved regions”, says Prosus.
Chandel and Kumar are alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, while Kothari is a seasoned educator specialising in mathematics.
The edtech start-up plans to use the new funds to expand into three new states, grow its AI research and language support capabilities and scale its on-ground marketing and distribution strategy.
The cost of disruption
Prosus has been working on ways to reconfigure its education business affected by the rise of generative AI models.
In the 2024 financial year, the group took huge writedowns of $1.7bn, a sign of the costly mistakes, particularly in the edtech portfolio.
Prosus — which has large investments in companies such as China’s Tencent, Brazil’s iFood and India’s Swiggy — entered the edtech market in 2016. Its main edtech units include Stack Overflow, Skillsoft, Byju’s, Brainly, Codecademy, Eruditus, Sololearn and Udemy.
A big uptick in its edtech platforms during the worldwide coronavirus lockdowns led it to increase its investment focus on the sector. But that has not borne the expected fruit.
By that time, it had invested $3.9bn in edtech, with $3bn going into three businesses: Stack Overflow, Skillsoft and Byju’s. “None of those are worth what we paid,” said Ervin Tu, then-president and chief investment officer of the group.
Stack Overflow was hit hardest, particularly by the rise in generative AI models, which have challenged parts of its offering.
Road ahead
Looking ahead, the group appears hopeful that its latest investment will be a good one.
According to Singh, who serves as CEO of Arivihan: “India has 250-million students, yet quality personalised education remains a privilege for few. Traditional coaching models simply cannot scale to serve Bharat’s huge student population at affordable price points.
“Our AI-first approach doesn’t just make education accessible, it makes it truly personalised for every student, regardless of their location or economic background. This funding allows us to accelerate our mission of democratising world-class education across Real Bharat.”
Dhruv Gupta, part of the India investment team at Prosus Ventures, said: “We’ve been actively exploring breakthrough applications of AI across sectors, and education remains one of the most compelling frontiers.
“Arivihan stood out as an AI-native learning platform purpose-built for India’s aspirational students, combining deep personalisation with scalable impact. Their first-principles approach to product and distribution gives them a real shot at transforming how millions of students learn and succeed,” he said.
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