Edtech in 2025: Transforming education beyond Southeast Asia’s classrooms

Education is essential for a nation’s growth and should be prioritized as a fundamental aspect of national interest. The advancement of technology significantly contributes to the transformation of education by offering unprecedented access for all. Today, we witness the rise of educational technology (edtech), which seamlessly integrates traditional and modern learning methods.

The edtech industry represents a dynamic and specialized field within the broader tech landscape, dedicated to the creative, innovative development and effective implementation of various tools. This includes software solutions, hardware innovations, and streamlined systemic processes geared toward transforming and enriching the educational experience.

Governments throughout Southeast Asia are actively promoting edtech, acknowledging its transformative potential to empower learners and close the gaps in educational equity.

Singapore’s ‘Edtech Masterplan 2030‘ aims to nurture digitally empowered, future-ready learners and innovators, with teachers playing the role of technologically adept, collaborative learning designers. 

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the government introduced ‘Ruang GTK’, a platform to support teachers, principals, school supervisors, and education personnel to improve their teaching and learning skills. 

Additionally, the country needs nine million digital professionals by 2030 to support its digital economy, highlighting a critical gap in digital education and skills training. With these opportunities to address, Indonesia’s edtech industry is projected to reach US$1.8 billion by 2027 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 15%.

In Singapore, the aging population demands more lifelong learning and adult education programs, alongside a need for inclusive education policies to support diverse learners. Singapore’s educational technology market size is forecasted to grow to reach US$2.2 billion in 2027 with a CAGR of 13.6%, showing there is still room for growth in this country.

While in Vietnam, there are significant disparities between urban and rural education quality and access, which also seek to improve higher education standards to better prepare graduates for the global job market. This brings the edtech market predicted to have a value of US$5.4 billion with a promising CAGR growth of 9.3% until 2028. 

Furthermore, all of these lead to promising growth in Southeast Asia’s edtech sector for years to come, and we will delve into how East Ventures’ backed portfolio companies take on these challenges and grasp the opportunities.

Insights on today’s Southeast Asia edtech scene

At the East Ventures Summit 2024, we gathered some of the leading Southeast Asian edtech companies, including Belva Devara, Co-Founder and CEO of Ruangguru; Evan Heng, Founder and CEO of  Zenith Learning Group (Zenith); Prerna A Jhunjhunwala, Founder and CEO of Creative Galileo; Tu Pham, Founder and CEO of the Prep, and Neo Zhizong, Co-Founder and CEO of Geniebook. They shared their nuances in this sector. 

After the COVID-19 pandemic was subdued, this sector served as a catalyst for the adoption of blended learning, which combines the best of online and offline instruction. This situation has led to a surge in demand for remote learning in recent years, resulting in the emergence of numerous educational technology startups in Southeast Asia.

Belva admitted that the pandemic has caused a shift towards hybrid learning methods. However, this transition has also brought about its own set of challenges that have emerged as the pandemic’s impact begins to decrease.

“Before the pandemic, people were doing both online and offline learning and when the pandemic hit, offline learning became impossible, everybody wanted to go online. We took the opportunity and doubled down on online products. However, when the pandemic stopped, everybody wanted to go back to offline learning. So, we expanded our offerings to create a hybrid learning experience,” Belva explained at the Summit. Ruangguru currently operates more than 280 learning centers across Indonesia.

Belva Devara and Iman Usman founded Ruangguru in 2014. Today, Ruangguru is one of the largest edtech companies in Indonesia that focuses on education-based services and is already operating in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Recently in Indonesia, Ruangguru successfully introduced an innovative education show by launching Ruangguru Clash of Champions (COC) in 2024 featuring 50 top university students competing in a series of challenges in memorization, logic, and math. The pilot season of the show has successfully gathered over 100 million views, and this year, they are back with a continuation called Ruangguru Academy of Champion (AOC) 2025. 

The AOC features 36 top-performing high school students from 12 districts across Indonesia who competed in multiple academic challenges or quizzes, showcasing their knowledge and skills in various subjects across science and social studies. 

With this education show, Ruangguru hoped that students all over Indonesia would rediscover their motivation to learn,  especially after the pandemic, and achieve their academic goals and aspirations.

Though Singapore’s education system is more advanced due to easier access to learning resources and a more equitable distribution of qualified teachers, the country still faces several market challenges.

“Geniebook provides students with what they need through personalization, using innovation and AI (artificial intelligence). Since 2017, we have been harnessing the power of AI to personalize the content for students: we have our Smart Question Bank, live classes, and GenieAsk–a real-time Q&A platform where parents and students can post questions. Recently, we have expanded into our hybrid model,” said Neo.

Geniebook was founded in 2017 by Alicia Cheong and Neo Zhizhong. This educational technology startup provides a powerful suite of online learning products that are designed to help students accelerate their academic performance with advanced technology. These platforms aim to help elementary and middle school students learn more effectively and perform better academically.

For early childhood education, Singapore is home to the startup Zenith Learning Group, founded by Evan Heng. This platform is focused on creating effective and efficient learning methods for children aged 7 to 12, introducing a gamified approach to enhance engagement and make learning more enjoyable.

“We try to look at it from a very microscopic level in terms of every single micro-decision in the platform. Is it tied back to the children’s interests? Is it really motivating or interesting to them? And I think ultimately what we’re able to discover is that when you add that gamification element to it, students are actually more motivated to learn,” Evan explained.

Shifting our lenses towards Vietnam, one of the country’s educational challenges is the low teacher-to-student ratio. This disparity results in uneven and inequitable educational quality.

“For example, a Chinese Mandarin or an English class only has one teacher and about 40-50 students in a traditional classroom. That doesn’t work, because students would have no interaction time directly with the teacher and they would not be able to improve right?,” Tu Pham posed.

“So for us, what we have been trying to do is we do not put the teachers at the front to teach the students directly. Instead, we put them in the R&D department so they can develop the materials, where they can work with the AI machine learning teams to develop the technologies for students so that we can serve more students.”

Prep is an innovative online learning platform dedicated to mastering standardized tests. It seamlessly blends innovative technology, modern teaching methods, and a learner-centric approach. Since its founding in 2020, Prep has grown rapidly and attracted more than 100,000 users across the provinces and cities of Vietnam.

Meanwhile, outside Southeast Asia, specifically in India, they are facing challenges similar to those faced by Vietnam in implementing effective solutions.

“India is a very interesting market, which is very demographically different. From one place to another, it is almost like a journey of a few hours, and the interiors of India are not even well connected. You cannot even imagine the teachers because, with a population of 180 million students, you have less than 300,000 teachers to teach them. These are qualified teachers. Everybody else is not qualified in India to teach,” said Prerna.

To solve these problems, Creative Galileo, founded in 2020, is empowering teachers through multiple trainings and providing them with quality education. These efforts also include online classrooms, lesson plans, and AI resources so they can create effective teaching materials, held for over 1,000 schools in India.

3 Key factors for the future of edtech 

With these differing demographics, accessibility to education, and cultural diversity across regions, the founders identified three key factors that will drive the growth of educational technology: 

1. Hybridized learning method

For many years, conventional education in several countries across Southeast Asia has relied on offline or face-to-face methods to deliver the curriculum. East Ventures, as the leading and pioneering venture capital firm in Southeast Asia, has a diverse portfolio that actively contributes to the emergence of hybrid learning methods through investing in several edtech startups. By combining online and offline approaches, this method ultimately aims to make education more accessible and effective to every student.

Companies like Ruangguru, Zenith, Prep, and Geniebook have contributed to the advancement of hybrid learning in Southeast Asia. Leveraging internet technology and remote teaching, students can now access a better quality of education.

2. AI utilizes data-driven approaches

The popularity of AI in recent times, particularly in assisting human activities, has become a major trend and one of the sectors most affected by this technological breakthrough is education.

AI has already been adopted by several edtech startups across Southeast Asia to help design teaching systems tailored to local needs based on data-driven insights. For startups, AI also holds great potential in assisting teachers to enhance the quality of instruction and education.

For example, companies like Prep and Geniebook are leveraging AI to personalize teaching content for students. AI may not be the ultimate solution to all the challenges in education, but it is a powerful tool with the potential to transform the learning experience in Southeast Asia.

By addressing key issues and adopting a human-centered approach, educators and policymakers can harness AI to personalize learning, enhance accessibility, and empower both students and teachers.

The future of education in the region lies in a balanced integration of AI and human expertise. AI should be viewed as a tool that complements and enhances teachers’ vital role in fostering critical thinking, creativity, and social-emotional growth. As AI continues to evolve, Southeast Asia has the opportunity to shape the future of AI-driven education, ensuring that quality education remains inclusive and accessible to all.

3. Gamification elements in teaching 

Gamification has become a crucial aspect of the learning process. It helps stimulate students to become more motivated to learn specific subjects that align with their interests and abilities.

“I think, especially when kids are younger, a lot of the motivation is a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic. But what I think we have seen is that a lot of them are always going to be drawn to what they find the most visually appealing, whatever is the most fun for them. Ultimately, we want to harness this motivation towards the right outcomes, and not just limited to their only interest in playing games, but what kind of educational value we’re able to provide,” said Evan.

Most kids nowadays prefer learning through what they see, read, and hear. By integrating the concepts of learning and playing, edtech startups and schools can design more effective and efficient curriculums.

“The idea is if you do not make education visual for children, exciting for children, gamified for children, today’s children don’t have that kind of motivation to learn anymore. So to approach education from a different angle is very important in my view,” Prerna explained.

As we look forward, East Ventures is committed to supporting Southeast Asian edtech startups or companies more than ever. 

We have had a persistent belief in this region for more than a decade, and we will try hard and keep the work on delivering believable Southeast Asia. We are confident that with focused efforts, this region will not only conquer its commitment but also become a center of economic power on an international scale.

If you are a startup founder building in the edtech industry and looking for funding, send your pitch here.