Arivihan Raises US$10M as 80% of Its Users Come From Rural and Tier-3 India

Indian AI learning platform Arivihan has raised US$10 million in a Series A round co-led by returning investors Prosus Ventures and Accel, with a further US$200,000 from angel investors linked to accelerator GSF. The deal takes total funding past US$15 million, following a US$4.17 million pre-Series A in July 2025 that the two firms also led jointly and seed backing through Accel's Atoms programme in March 2024.

Founded by IIT Roorkee alumni Ritesh Singh Chandel and Sonu Kumar alongside maths educator Rushabh Kothari, the Indore-based company serves students preparing for state board examinations, the CBSE curriculum and the NEET medical entrance test, with a core focus on Class 12 learners outside India's biggest cities.

Arivihan describes itself as a fully automated online learning platform. Its product combines interactive video lessons that adjust content in real time, instant doubt-solving in which an AI tutor generates an explanatory video, personalised study and revision routes, and progress tracking that benchmarks each learner against peers and sets daily targets.

The system runs on fine-tuned versions of Meta's open-source Llama 2 and Llama 3 models to generate answers, verify solutions and analyse each student's strengths and weaknesses, with additional open models producing speech and video. The company says this lets it deliver the features at up to 12 times lower cost than conventional platforms, although classes are still taught by a mix of human teachers and AI.

Localisation is central to the strategy. Arivihan teaches in six languages including Hindi and several regional dialects, and says 80% of its subscribers come from tier-3 cities and rural India - a deliberate bet on students whose first language is not one of the country's mainstream tongues.

"India's education opportunity extends far beyond the metros, and some of our strongest adoption is already coming from smaller towns and rural communities," said co-founder and CEO Ritesh Singh Chandel. "Edtech so far has made content cheaper. We are making the entire personalised learning system affordable for every student."

Dhruv Gupta, an investor at Prosus, said the firm is backing companies that use AI to bring critical digital services to the next several hundred million users in India, and argued that AI can shift the sector's focus from infrastructure-building to learning outcomes. Accel's Anagh Prasad called the AI tutor the first at-scale demonstration of that thesis in the country.

The round lands as capital returns to Indian edtech. Lytmus AI raised roughly US$522,400 in June for AI-driven NEET preparation, Elevate Education took US$1.78 million from WestBridge Capital in July, YoLearn.ai closed a seed round in September, and byteXL secured US$9 million led by Elevar Equity in October. India has more than 250 million enrolled students and a teacher-to-student ratio below 1:200, leaving standardised exam preparation the main route to upward mobility.

Arivihan will put the money into AI research, vernacular-language capability, expansion into new states and the CBSE board, plus performance marketing and on-ground distribution, deepening coverage in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar. Policy tailwinds help: the CBSE launched computational thinking and AI courses for grades 3 to 8 for the 2026-27 academic year, and the 2025-26 federal budget earmarked 5 billion rupees, about US$52.2 million, for an AI education centre of excellence at IIT Madras.