ThinkZone is an award winning social impact start-up from Cuttack (Odisha, India) providing high quality, low-cost education to underserved children in low resource communities. Using an innovative ‘School-in-a-Box’ solution run on offline technology with proprietary teaching activities and class management tools; ThinkZone employs local women as micro-entrepreneurs to deliver quality early-grade education programs following an MIT evidence based pedagogy adopting a Teaching-at-the-Right Level approach.
Investment Rationale
The funding by Gray Matters Capital’s edLABS is aimed at 4 key strategic initiatives of automating teacher training, refining curriculum, improving performance monitoring by integrating analytics with technology and forging partnerships with the objective to scale.
The prospect of ThinkZone employing 300 women entrepreneurs to impart tech-driven education to benefit nearly 2 million students in the next 5 years was the underlying reason for us as gender lens investors to back this social enterprise.
About Graymatterscap
Gray Matters Capital (GMC) is an Atlanta based impact investor with a gender lens that is on a mission to “Find a more purposeful life for 100 million women by 2036." Aligning with its mission is its strategy of making sector agnostic investments globally in for-profit enterprises whose products and services benefit women and girls at scale.
GMC sees education, primarily catering to under-resourced and low and middle income sections of the society, as a powerful tool to bring about gender equality and social equity. Over the past 12 years, it has focused on supporting the education ecosystem India by funding for-profit enterprises in the ‘learning to earning’ space, besides being pioneers in establishing the school finance industry catering to low cost private schools in India with Indian School Finance Company (ISFC); Pakistan with the set-up of Taleem Finance Company Ltd (TFCL), in addition to Nigeria (with EdFin Microfinance Bank).
GMC has till date funded over 80 enterprises across the world to the tune of US$ 125 million.
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