[StartupRecipe] Korea’s Edtech Startups Are Reinventing Themselves to Survive

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Korea’s Edtech Startups Are Reinventing Themselves to Survive

Between 2020 and 2022, South Korea’s edtech sector was one of the hottest in the startup ecosystem. Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic’s shift to online learning and a flood of venture capital, companies like Riiid, Mathpresso, Class101, and Elice Group attracted enormous investor attention. Riiid, best known for its TOEIC-focused AI tutoring app Santa, raised the equivalent of roughly $175 million from SoftBank alone, briefly putting it in contention for unicorn status. The prevailing belief was simple: technology could fundamentally transform education, and investors were willing to bet big on that premise.

That bet has since come under serious pressure.

As pandemic restrictions lifted and online platform usage declined, the edtech market contracted sharply. Investment into the sector tells the story clearly: Korean edtech startups raised approximately 83.1 billion won in 2023, followed by 119.4 billion won in 2024, and a mere 59.2 billion won in all of last year. The post-pandemic correction was compounding, and the arrival of generative AI tools like ChatGPT dealt a further blow — suddenly, many edtech products looked redundant next to a free, capable AI chatbot.

Companies that had secured funding on the strength of their technology found themselves unable to convert that promise into sustainable revenue. Investment dried up, and the pressure to evolve became existential.

Rather than fold, several of the sector’s most prominent players have embarked on dramatic transformations — some so sweeping that the word “edtech” no longer applies.

Elice Group, which launched in 2015 as an AI-powered coding education platform, has arguably made the most radical pivot. The company has effectively dropped education from its core identity, repositioning itself as a full-stack AI infrastructure company. It now operates a GPU cloud business, purchasing Nvidia GPUs directly and leasing computing capacity to enterprises and research institutions. It has since expanded into designing and operating portable modular data centers — a business that would have seemed entirely unrelated to its educational roots just a few years ago.

Riiid, once a high-profile AI tutoring company backed by SoftBank, went through a period of genuine crisis, including a founder transition and significant restructuring. It has recently rebranded as Socra AI and is repositioning as a comprehensive language learning platform, integrating generative AI to support speaking and writing instruction alongside its original test-prep capabilities. The company is also revisiting the possibility of going public.

Class101, the popular hobby and creative skills platform, chose to retain its educational focus but overhaul its business model. After transitioning from a marketplace model to an unlimited subscription service in 2022, it has since adopted a hybrid approach — combining subscriptions with individual course sales — and added a B2B corporate training segment. The result has been a return to profitability.

Mathpresso, widely recognized abroad for its math problem-solving app Qanda, faced a direct threat from the rise of large language models. Its response has been to absorb that threat rather than retreat from it — internalizing LLM technology to strengthen its own services. On the market side, the company is running an online tutoring business in Vietnam and has launched Cramify, a dedicated app targeting university students in the United States.

The pivot isn’t limited to pure edtech. Startups in the adjacent childcare space — including Tictoccroc, Jaranda, and Momsitter — have been shifting away from direct-to-consumer babysitting services and toward B2B and institutional care solutions.

Most notably, Tictoccroc has rebranded as Connecting the Dots and broadened its service portfolio to include pet care and senior care, dramatically expanding its addressable customer base beyond parents of young children.

What’s unfolding across Korea’s edtech sector is more than a collection of individual survival stories. The category itself is being restructured. Companies that once built their identities around education are now leveraging their underlying technology to serve entirely different markets — or are redefining what education means in the age of AI.

There are early signs that investor sentiment may be shifting back. In the first four months of this year alone, Korean edtech companies have attracted 17.3 billion won in investment. If that pace holds through the rest of 2026, total annual funding would surpass last year’s 59.2 billion won — a modest but meaningful signal that the sector may be finding its footing again.

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