The global online education outfit WuKong Education has announced the closure of its Series B funding round – as well as plans to announce a new English division.

The funding round, which is led by Marcy Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, totals at least $10m. The exact amount remains undisclosed.

Also on the docket of investors are two big names – actor Daniel Wu of Tomb Raider fame and Super Bowl champion linebacker Bobby Wagner.

“Many of our investors, including both our celebrity backers, actually have children that use our platform and independently subscribe to our courses, so they can witness the impact firsthand,” Cicy Ding, head of education at WuKong, told The PIE News.

“It’s been great to receive that support and trust from our partners, who clearly share our passion,” she continued.

The funding round will aim to further expand WuKong’s current reach, having already been used by 300,000 families across 100 countries.

Its current roster has Chinese and Maths tutoring, with over 3,000 teachers at its disposal, but the company has also begun to pilot a completely new division.

WuKong English Language Arts began its pilot project in June and the plan is to expand it to be an equal third of WuKong’s offerings, especially as English as a subject would be “much larger than Chinese”.

“We’re only open for children in the third grade at the moment for English Language Arts – but it’s by design.

“We also want to make sure the courses are designed carefully and that they actually fulfil the students’ needs and of course, meet parents’ expectations. Time will tell,” Ding explained.

English Language Arts, or ELA is ordinarily offered to primary school age students to provide “effective tutoring of reading and writing in English”.

“We want to make sure the courses are designed carefully”

“English, of course, is very essential for [our students] to understand, even for mathematics and sciences, like physics and chemistry – pretty much all other subjects following it; so we want to help our children to develop a very good foundation of English while they are in primary school,” Ding said.

The pilot project comes as WuKong settles in to its headquarters in Silicon Valley, where it initially moved in late 2022 from its founding country of New Zealand.

“Silicon Valley is closer to our major markets – the US and Canada specifically. So we want to focus on that, get closer to the users, listen to them and examine how they use our product,” Ding added.

The company will still have offices in New Zealand, China and the east of the US, Ding confirmed.

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