Ukrainian venture firm Genesis Investments has led a $1 million round of investment in Estonian edtech gaming startup 99math. The other participants in the round are Estonian VC fund Change Ventures as well as five angel investors from leaders at companies including Bolt, Transferwise, and Pipedrive. Neither the individual contributions of deal participants nor the terms of the transaction were disclosed.
99math has designed a multiplayer math game used by teachers in classrooms around the world to make math fun. “For some [math] is the hardest and the the most boring subject,” said Tõnis Kusmin, CEO of 99math, in an exchange with GamesBeat. “But games are designed for the player and when designed well, they can keep us incredibly engaged. In education, gamification has been around for a while. But I don’t think many of the edtech gamified solutions are actually very engaging.”
The three-year-old company claims over 300,000 active users as of January 2021.
Genesis Investments is a Ukrainian early-stage venture capital fund investing in seed-stage tech startups from Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. Launched in 2018 as the in-house startup fund of Genesis, a Kyiv-based product IT company, the fund has made more than 20 investments since then with tickets usually ranging from $100,000 and $1 million.
The fund has several edtech startups in its portfolio, including Intellectokids and AllRight, two companies with Russian founders.
Sources: GamesBeat, Kyiv Post, Genesis Investments
