[Funding] HobSpace raises around 1cr in Pre Series A1 from Inflection Point Ventures

HobSpace is a Mumbai based startup that aims to enhance extra-curricular activities for children. The startup has raised around 1cr in Pre-Series A1 round from Inflection Point Ventures. Only in October 2020, HobSpace closed INR 3.3 crore Seed round from Artha Ventures, Angel List and others. The company will use these funds to multiply its offline centres to reach out to the top towns over the next three years. It also intends to have 20 centres in the top 3 cities in the next 12 months, to start with.

Priyal Goel Sheth and Harsh Jain co-founded HobSpace in 2019. Later, they quickly capitalized on-time availability with kids and the changing needs of learning, both in India and internationally, during the lockdown. Further, HobSpace now intends to transform school buildings, playgrounds, clubhouses, and community centres into educational playgrounds and hobby centres with diverse after-school activities. Thus, children will have a plethora of options to choose from. These will include indoor as well as outdoor activities. Currently, the company has students from India, UAE, Singapore and South Africa.

From the leaders

Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, IPV says, “With education moving online, children are increasingly finding it hard to carve out their playtime. Even parents are worried about it. Thus, HobSpace, which has a mix of offline and online activities for children, makes their model quite attractive to us. Given the pandemic, HobSpace still logged 33% growth in subscriber base m-o-m. We also liked their focus on unit economics and business viability.”

Priyal Goel Sheth, Co-Founder, HobSpace says, “IPV has provided us tremendous support since our first engagement. One thing that we always stress upon at HobSpace is having great partners who can guide and mentor us while we build and scale this exciting model. With the large investor network at IPV, we have been able to learn many things from a very diverse group. IPV team has spent a lot of time with us to deep dive on business metrics and achieving efficiencies.”

The education industry has 350 million+ K-12 students in India, out of which 56 million kids reside in urban India. With INR 1,000 bn Supplemental Education Market (growth rate of 8%), there is a large, fast-growing, untapped market opportunity that HobSpace is addressing.