Today, Gaocheng Capital announced a Series-C round of investment of US$265 million in EEO, a leading SaaS company focusing on educational solutions, together with Hillhouse, Tencent, SIG and INCE Capital. This series of financing will continue to be used for R&D of underlying technologies in education, further enhancing its OMO (Online-Merge-Offline) strategy.
Recently, EEO launched ClassInX online classroom, aiming to provide a simple yet powerful solution to the educational industry to integrate online and offline teaching and learning. ClassInX is perfect for digital teaching, which used to be a headache for traditional offline classrooms. From blackboard to homework, from teaching materials to after-class Q&A, we are now able to make classrooms digital with zero budget, helping increase efficiency in education.
Song Junbo, Founder and CEO of EEO, said, “Today, people communicate with each other in the way of “café + WeChat”, and I believe the future of education will also rapidly move to the integration of online + offline classrooms. We have helped schools and educational institutions construct their online capabilities; we will continue to boost digitization in offline classrooms.”
Founded in September 2014, EEO is a leading SaaS provider in the education industry. Its product ClassIn is the world’s first online interactive classroom based on various educational scenarios.
Combining powerful underlying technologies with product design, ClassIn supports a full range of class sizes and diverse online teaching scenarios; with built-in teaching tools, interactive e-Blackboard and classroom materials, ClassIn is able to support different classroom types and teaching scenarios; with global synchronization and latency-free teaching, teachers and students can immerse themselves in interactive classrooms anywhere.
Since COVID-19 pandemic, companies providing offline education and training have suffered a lot, so the OMO model integrating online and offline has become the way out. During this period, ClassIn supported over 10,000 companies and institutions providing offline education and training to help with their OMO transition.
According to Song Junbo, online education is not only the way to face the challenges of COVID-19, but also to contribute to the ultimate goal of teaching, which is to cultivate independent learners with self-discipline, creative thinking, problem-solving skills and cross-cultural communicating ability. The OMO model, with higher efficiency and better results, has been recognized as the trend in the education industry.
Back in 2017, EEO built the underlying infrastructure for education, launching an online classroom product based on the OMO model. In the second half of 2020, EEO began to support the upgrade to the OMO in the education industry.
On 13 August 2020, ClassIn launched its group-based teaching model. Teachers can divide students into up to 50 groups, each with its own collaborative blackboard and audio and video functions for group discussion. Teachers are free to access any group to listen to or participate in the discussion, and invite any group to share their discussion take-away at the end of group discussion, making the teaching process exactly the same as in an offline classroom. The introduction of group-based teaching makes it possible for OMO model with synchronized online and offline teaching procedure.
Digital content plays an indispensable role in the OMO model. For this, ClassIn will release a content platform that provides premium quality digital content to classrooms. With ClassIn, education content can be put on any blackboard online or offline, with improved copyright management; based on hierarchical licensing and standard-format documents, it can operate seamlessly in teaching, learning, practicing, testing and evaluation. The ClassIn-based ecosystem will popularize digital content, help schools and institutions bring their existing teaching and learning online with good quality, and enable the sharing of quality education resources in the whole world.
Song Junbo said: “We would like to thank Hillhouse Capital, Tencent, SIG, INCE Capital and Gaocheng Capital, as well as all investors who have supported EEO along the way. With the joint support from our industry partners, EEO has built a system that integrates online and offline to support teachers and schools and help make education more interactive. We are honored to have taken this journey with you.
Jing Hong, Founding Partner of Gaocheng Capital, said: “As an investment fund focused on enterprise business services, Gaocheng has long been following leading products in vertical industries. Digital empowerment is bound to be key for education industry, and this year’s pandemic has accelerated this trend. EEO has created great products based on visionary insights and powerful technologies, setting the pace for the industry in underlying technical architecture and application features. We believe EEO respects the essence of education and empowers educators with technology, and we are willing to support EEO in the long run to create long-term value with product R&D and push the boundaries of this industry.”
Dozens of universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Beijing Normal University, East China Normal University and top-notch middle schools such as High School affiliated to Renmin University of China, the Affiliated High School of Peking University, BHSF, Beijing 101 Middle School and Shanghai Foreign Language School Affiliated to SISU, have already started to use ClassIn in their daily teaching. More than 70% of training institutions with revenue over RMB100 million, including XDF and TAL, have joined hands with ClassIn.
With its professional expertise, ClassIn has also been widely used in schools and educational institutions overseas. Universities such as Universitas Budapestinensis de Rolando Eötvös nominata, Universidad de Alcalá in Spain and Abu Dhabi University in the UAE, have used ClassIn as their online learning platform. Currently, ClassIn has 60,000 school customers from 35 countries and 20 million monthly active individual users from150 countries and regions.
