(Yicai Global) Aug. 22 -- Chinese online primary education startup Hai Ke Tang raised CNY50 million (USD7.5 million) in A-round financing led by Tou Tou Shidao Investment with support from Sinovation Ventures and Taoli capital.

The firm will use the funding for research and development and to recruit more teaching staff and build its presence in second- and third-tier cities to give more people access to online one-to-one courses, Jiemian News cited Ji Yi, chief executive, as saying. The money will help to improve software and hardware and optimize products and services.

Hai Ke Tang will use Big Data and smart technologies to further develop its curriculum structure and improve students' academic performance, Ji said. It will also open offline stores to meet the individual needs of students and their parents.

The K-12 (kindergarten through grade 12) education market is bigger than the online English training industry, said Xu Wei, director at Tou Tou Shidao. It is extremely likely that the market will birth a unicorn of similar size to VIPKID, the online Chinese platform that offers an American elementary education to China, he added.

A young startup backed by Only Education Group, which is affiliated with Shanghai Jiaotong University, Hai Ke Tang is an online live-streaming K-12 tutoring platform. It enables students to attend virtual classes taught by teachers from all over the country. Its monthly revenue has surpassed CNY10 million and it has users from more than 500 cities. The firm also has more than 6,000 tutors from top schools nationwide.