makkajai is combining engaging edu-games and learning analytics to create an adaptive learning platform. This will enable a personalized learning experience for kids, granular skill-level and real-time reporting for parents and teachers; all leading to improved learning outcomes.
The Company was founded in July 2014 (although it was conceptualised mid 2013).
They have launched three games so far. Their first math game – Monster Math Classic was launched in Nov 2014 and followed it up with 2 more math games – Monster Math and Monster Math Duels (multiplayer) in Dec 2015.
Across all the games, makkajai have over 1.5 Million Downloads, all of which are organic and their solution is used across 500+ schools in the US. Their Monthly Active Users are >100,000 and they have grown consistently at a rate of 25 – 30% month-on-month purely organically, without any expenditure on customer acquisition.
The company's games are being used by hundreds of thousands of parents and 500+ schools across the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany – with a major India push planned in the coming months given our recent Android launch.
Their funding round involves prominent investors such as Ananth Narayanan - CEO, Myntra, Anand Chandrasekaran - Former Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal, Mekin Maheshwari - Former Chief People Officer, Flipkart, , Ravi Garikipati - Head of Engineering, Flipkart, Divyesh Shah - CEO, Indiabulls Ventures, Swastika Company Limited - Active early stage investor in India and Africa. The round was syndicated on the LetsVenture platform.
makkajai is founded by Roopesh Shenoy (CEO), Vinayak Palankar (Chief Mktg. Officer), Deep Shah (CTO) and Abhishek Awadhani (Chief Business Officer); a combination of ISB graduates and ex-education entrepreneurs.
Speaking on the fundraise, Roopesh Shenoy: Co-Founder and CEO of the company says, “Glad and humbled with all the backing we have received. My entire team has done amazing work to get us till here. It's now time to put our heads down and continue delivering on our promise - transform our customers' lives and translate that into a healthy, fast growing business.”
Roopesh Shenoy adds, “We are creating a platform with edu-games as the content and reporting features – thereby we compete with most education content companies. Our key differentiators are: Most education companies which say that they target kids still design products for the schools and the teachers; we develop products with the kids at the center of our universe. We are one of the only education gaming company that uses a ‘design thinking approach’ in building education games. We uniquely and seamlessly combine great game design with sound pedagogy, to significantly impact learning outcomes (students who have used Monster Math have reported becoming twice as fast at Math facts in 2 weeks of playing the game).
We are one of the few companies to think of this on a global scale – whereas most companies are looking only at the US / developed markets.”
Speaking about the funding, Ananth Narayanan, CEO Myntra says, “I believe that education through games will be a vast space. The founding team is impressive and their passion for the space comes through.”
Vaibhav Jain, MD of Swastika Company Limited, an active early stage investor in India and Africa, adds “makkajai is in a segment which is unique and has infinite possibilities to explore. They have an excellent team who have a proven record of planning and execution of what customers demand.”
Abhishek Awadhani, speaking about the funding adds - “With the current fundraise, we are running several experiments – both on the content and distribution side. Through these experiments, we are confident that we will scale our user and revenue growth to 10x our current levels. There is a big push planned in both US and India; and with the backing and advise of our investors and customers, we are confident of building a product and distribution model that has never been seen before in the ed-tech space.”
