When VIPKID made the world’s largest single-round fundraising in pre-secondary school education this summer, it inspired investors who foresaw growing demand for online education in China a sector worth Rmb156 billion $23.4 billion in 2016 and projected to reach Rmb270 billion in 2019.
Launched in 2014, online English-learning unicorn VIPKID has become China’s largest education-technology start-up, with more than 200,000 paying students and over 20,000 teachers in the US and Canada.
Among its backers are some of China’s best-known Midas-makers, Sinovation Ventures and Sequoia Capital China, for example, both of whom were early investors and have made consecutive investments in VIPKID’s later fundraising rounds. Its latest...