India’s personalized app for pre-school students called OckyPocky has reportedly secured funds the amount of which has not been disclosed yet. The particular round of angel funding was led by Mumbai-based ah! Ventures which is a start-up focused growth catalyst.
The funds raised by the kid-tech startup will be utilized for the expansion of the company’s user base to the pre-school market in Tier 2 and Tier 3 centres. Also, it aims to tap the kids in the NRI market with cultural connect to India through a Hindi learning curriculum. Apart from this, the company is also planning to boost up its operations and enhance the technology.
Founded in2015 by Amit Agrawal, the former YouTube India Head and IIM Bangalore alumnus, OckyPocky is an app that works on tech-for-good and offers English learning, powered by speech recognition technology. The mobile app has been built and designed for India with its major focus on everyday spoken languages, personalizes the learning experience for kids through the application of NLP and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“OckyPocky’s mission is to change the way 160+ million preschool kids learn, starting at age 2. Preschool kids in the age of 2 to 6 constitute the 3rd largest gadget user demographic. Their minds are very fertile and we should leverage technology to facilitate the exponent growth during these critical foundation years,” said Amit Agrawal, Founder and CEO, OckyPocky.
“Language is a key skill they start learning, but many of them in Tier II and Tier III towns lack access especially to early-stage English language learning solutions. Existing internet content is often unsafe for them. We aim to change this with OckyPocky and help India build a better foundation for its future generation at a stage where it really matters. We are overwhelmed and grateful for the support we have had from our angels & mentors,” he added.
The startup claims that it has been gaining considerable traction notching up 2.3 million video views within a few months of its inauguration and with pre-school kids attempting 500k+ interactive questions on the platform. It has become one of the top apps for kids with more than 180000 downloads on the Google Play Store and more than 6000 downloads on Apple App Store.