Online education startup Day 1 Co. completes $28 mn Series D funding

Education content provider Day 1 Company announced Thursday it has completed a Series D funding worth 35 billion won ($28 million.)

A number of venture capital heavyweights participated in the latest round, namely: Hanwha Life Insurance Co.; Signite Partners the corporate venture capital (CVC) subsidiary of Shinsegae Group; and Mirae Asset Securities.

The latest funding size is over threefold that of the previous round, which stood at 11.2 billion won. 

The number of South Korean adults taking online courses for better opportunities skyrocketed during the COVID-19 outbreak and the following stay-at-home measures.

More working-age adults began taking foreign language or coding classes online. 

Day 1 Company’s revenue more than doubled from 41.8 billion won in 2020 to around 100 billion won last year. 

The CEO of Day 1 Company Lee Kang-min told The Korea Economic Daily that the adoption of the company-in-company (CIC) structure was successful in that it enabled for fast and flexible growth of the different brands. 

The startup rebranded itself as Day 1 Company from Fast Campus. At the same time, it incorporated the four business divisions into separate companies – Fast Campus, Lemonade, Coloso and Snowball. 

INDEPENDENT OPERATIONS

Each CIC enjoys independent rights when it comes to business strategy, hiring, and compensation for its employees. Industry insiders say granting such independence helps with speedy growth. 

Of the four CICs, the business-to-business (B2B) education provider Fast Campus saw its revenue increase three times year on-year to reach 13 billion won in 2021. 

Lemonade, which offers foreign language education, rebranded its MyLight service and launched new services Newspresso and Winner’s Pick. MyLight is a subscription service designed to encourage its users to get into the habit of doing a little something each day to boost their foreign language proficiency. 

The accumulated membership count for all Lemonade services stands at 350,000 people so far. 

Targeted learning platform Coloso recorded 24 billion won in revenue last year and successfully entered the US and Japanese markets. 

Snowball, which specializes in job training, began offering courses for those aspiring to work as developers at Korea’s big tech companies. The courses were designed for getting hired by Naver Corp., Kakao Corp., LINE, Coupang, or Woowa Brothers. 

Snowball claims that most of its students were able to get jobs at the companies of their choice. 

Day 1 Company began as a CIC of Fast Track Asia in 2014 with the goal of providing learning materials and platforms to adults, until it parted ways with the latter three years later. 

The company received 5.5 billion won in Series A in 2018 and 10 billion won in Series B the next year. 

The accumulated funding amount has reached 65 billion won following the wrap-up of the Series D round. 

The company’s CEO said the aging society has sparked demand for continuing education for adults. 

“We will continue to create educational content for adults around the world; for both B2C and B2B through a combination of risk-taking and decisiveness,” Lee said. 

Write to Lan Heo at why@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.