Aotu Personalized Education gets tens of millions of yuan in financing

A Chinese education and training organization that specializes in providing tailor-made education announced on Friday that they have just got financing worth tens of millions of yuan.

Aotu Personalized Education, which is dedicated to providing K12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) personalized education to students in China’s second-tier, third-tier and even smaller cities, is financed by Beijing-based Kaixing Capital, which has focused investing in the consumer products.

Zhang Jinwei, founder and CEO of Aotu Personalized Education, says that there still exists an imbalance in access to education resources in the smaller cities of China, where it is difficult to find enough good teachers that can meet the requirements of students and parents.

In the future, Aotu would help solve that problem in two ways. First is to find top teachers in the first-tier cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, to give live courses online in key subjects such as English and mathematics. Another is to train more local teachers in the smaller cities, who could provide better personalized education.

Zhang says that their aim is to work with about 1,200 teachers and make its personalized education available to 120,000 students by 2018.

Established in 2011, Aotu has already built partnerships with more than 600 partners in China’s second-tier, third-tier and even smaller cities, including 6 schools and 14 joint schools. About 60 percent of courses they provide now are one-to-one instruction, while the rest are in small classes.

Xie Chenguang, chairman of the Kaixing Capital, says that personalized education is an unique and important form of education. He says he is quite positive about its prospects, as the market size of the education and training market in China now exceeds 960 billion yuan.