Cakap, one of the biggest Edtech platforms in Indonesia, has raisedU S$10m in an oversubscribed series B round to expand their certified course offering, as well as to fueli ts market expansion in providing better access to high quality education in Indonesia. The round was jointly led by MDI Ventures’ Centauri Fund and Heritas Capital, with participation from KB Investment and other undisclosed investors. The series B round wraps up the achievement of the company for the strong year by attaining its impressive growth through the profitability and role in supporting remote learning as a solution to minimize the negative impact of the pandemic in the country.
The respective investors will create added value to the company with the synergy from the biggest Telco provider, Telkom, to accelerate market expansion nationwide. Accompanied by Heritas Capital, this will expand the company’s social impact practices. In addition, KB Investment, part of KB Financial Group as a leading financial services provider from Korea, with its 20 years of investment experience will also support Cakap’s growth strategy.
Cakap as a profitable Edtech company for the last 2 years has successfully built a strong credibility and secured impressive growth by acquiring 1.5 Million students, with 500% YoY growth in Active Students
and more than 1 Million Apps download. Rated 4.9 out of 5 on Google Play Store, Cakap is the highes rated educational app in the country.
Tomy Yunus, Co-Founder & CEO of Cakap, stated “We are proud and excited to be part of the massive education transformation in Indonesia, where we combine high quality learning content, advanced
technology, and professional teachers in our ecosystem to deliver the best learning experience to our students. Therefore, to support our mission in elevating people’s lives, we are consistently learning our students’ unique behavior and enhancing our solution by developing our engine around AI and Machine
Learning to provide localized and personalized learning in accelerating students’ learning progress.”
Cakap has been leading the online language courses for Adults and Kids segments in Indonesia. Running
a tech platform enables Cakap to offer their service subscription at a much more affordable price than a typical brick and mortar tutoring service while giving their adults and kids students a wide selection of professional teachers both locally and internationally. Cakap also expanded their offering into Self-paced learning and certification courses that combine sequential multimedia learning, assessments, and LIVE
Class ad discussions, giving their students much flexibility to complete a certification for new job-specific skills.
The proceeds will further propel the tremendous momentum that the company has been enjoying and that has been empowering more than 1,000 teachers across the regions. With this new funding, Cakap
aims to improve their learning technology by exploring the implementation of machine learning and artificial intelligence which enable the learning progress to be more personalized to each student
through adaptive learning.
“Looking at the massive opportunity for educational access and development, we are confident to bring
Cakap to step forward to its next growth journey. The tech advancement will make Cakap offer more variety of learning opportunities for Indonesian society. It will be helpful to give broader impacts for untapped potential markets.” said Kenneth Li, Partner at MDI-KB’s Centauri.
“In a year since Heritas Capital led Cakap’s series A+ funding round, we are impressed by the tremendous business traction and impact achieved by the management team, benefitting diverse stakeholders such
as training teachers, reskilling workers and helping children learn amidst the pandemic. We are pleased to back Cakap once again as it successfully transits from venture to growth stage with solid execution and high capital efficiency, while further catalyzing access to quality affordable lifelong learning
opportunities for all in Indonesia and beyond” said Chik Wai Chiew, CEO and Executive Director of Heritas Capital.
Despite the offline schools starting to come back gradually, the Indonesian government believes that the growth of the Edtech sector will remain strong as hybrid learning is required to complement in-person learning. Rachmadi Widodo, Director of Primary Education Teachers, Ministry of Education, Culture,
Research and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia, in Cakap media gathering discussion (27/10) stated “Edtech will always be required for students as it is also our goal in transforming education into a
digital platform. Besides getting it from schools, we believe that Edtech will equip students with a broader landscape of knowledge from international horizon and critical thinking skills. We always support Edtech initiatives as we acknowledge that their goals will always align with our mission: to enhance the educational development in Indonesia.”
Cakap aims beyond new market expansion and technology advancement. It’s consistency in delivering equal opportunities for Indonesians to access high quality skills and continuously supporting human capital development through their initiatives, Cakap For The Nation (Cakap Untuk Bangsa) and Cakap Teacher Academy. Cakap focuses on developing local communities and drives for social economic empowerment to support Indonesia Maju 2045.