Ascend Vietnam Ventures leads $1 mln round for Singapore edtech firm Cerebry

Singapore-based artificial intelligence edtech startup Cerebry has raised a $1 million seed round led by Ho Chi Minh City-headquartered venture capital firm Ascend Vietnam Ventures (AVV), Cerebry has said.

The other investor in the round is Pentathlon Ventures, an India-based early stage venture capital fund, according to CrunchBase, a platform tracking and monitoring investment firms. CrunchBase did not specify each investor’s contribution in the round.

Cerebry said that with the funding, it plans to continue expanding its AI-powered practice platform to offer adaptive learning to millions of K-12 students in the Asia-Pacific region.

It also plans to develop their product further by expanding to new domains like science. Cerebry will expand its customer base to Vietnam and Japan as ones among its new markets.

“AVV partners with Cerebry as the company continues to scale its AI-driven edtech platform,” AVV general partner Eddie Thai said in a Cerebry announcement Tuesday on the seed round.

“We believe in their mission to make quality education truly adaptive and accessible to all, and we look forward to seeing Cerebry drive positive change in the education landscape,” he added.

Cerebry is led by Shubham Goyal, Rahul Singhal and Rohit Singhal, who came with strong engineering background and experience leading early and growth-stage startups.

HCMC-based Binh Tran and Eddie Thai, general partners at a group called 500 Startups Vietnam, launched their separate VC firm in May 2021 with a goal to invest in 25 domestic startups and others in Asia in three years of operations.

According to CrunchBase, AVV has so far made 10 investments, taking the lead in three of them, including the latest, which is also the first in 2023. Seven of them were recorded last year, and the other two were in the year of launching. With 25 investments expected, there are 15 more to come.

The other two investments led by AVV were recorded last year.

One was for HCMC-based financial service app Mfast. This firm announced last June it had raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by AVV with participation from Wavemaker and two other existing investors, Do Ventures (based in Vietnam) and JAFCO Asia, bringing Mfast’s total capital funding to $4 million at the time of announcing.

In March 2022, Hanoi-based Mandu, an internet marketplace platform that offers product source, marketing, warehousing, and after-sales services, announced it had raised $1 million in a seed round led by AVV as the single investor.