Dr Manasvi M. Kamat
The Kerala State Start-up Mission got a shot in arm with the news that a first deaf start-up ‘Digital Arts Academy for the Deaf’ (DaaD) it incubated is all set to associate with the global software application provider, ‘Adobe’. DaaD has plans to design courses to train hearing impaired in various applications like Photoshop and animation.
DaaD, an EduTech startup was incubated with a seed-funding of just Rs. 1 lakh from Kerala State in 2018 by two hearing impaired women aiming to provide quality, skill-oriented education for other impaired like them. This startup focuses on delivering accessible technical education to the 18 million-odd hearing impaired across India by providing courses in IT subjects in Indian Sign Languages and to do a certificate course to make them more employable.
DaaD is an excellent example to prove that the time is ripe for the blossoming of innovative EduTech startups in India. In the last month the Byju Raveendran founded firm ‘Byju’s’ made its grand entry into the US by acquiring US-based Osmo for $120 million. This Indian top EduTech startup also has its presence in West Asian markets and made a record braking entry in the $5-billion club after its valuation soared by $2 billion, with the latest funding round of $86 million.
India with dense population and large sections living in rural areas poses significant challenge for the education industry. Deteriorating quality of education, less affordability of higher education, and increasing commercialisation of education in offers many challenges to the providers of formal education, and inter-alia opens up ample entrepreneurial opportunities for entrepreneurs to get in to the Indian educational space.
It is heartening to note that the Indian EduTech Start-up eco system is flourishing and the deserving start-ups are getting funded. Recently, with the Modi government’s initiatives like Startup India and Make in India, seed and venture funding got a major boost. Secondly the popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in which technology allows the matching of individual lenders with borrowers outside of traditional intermediaries such as banks is also spreading quickly across India. Both these opportunities have led to significant reduction in the roadblocks to entrepreneurship funding in India.
A population of 1.3 billion people, out of which about half are less than 20 years old offers good scope for entrepreneurial activities in the education sector. According to a report by India Brand Equity Foundation India’s education sector clocked a whopping US$ 91.7 billion in revenues in 2018 according. This study has further projected this industry to reach US$ 101 billion in 2019 and $180 billion by 2020, nearly double from now, more than half of which is dominated by formal education. Of this, e-learning accounts for just about $2 billion but is the second-largest globally after the US. A few more ventures like the Byju’s, and India’s EduTech Startup revolution will rock the global industry.
Despite the sheer magnitude of India’s formal education sector, one of the key issues of Indian education system is lack of quality teachers with student-teacher ratio as high as 100:1. The Byju’s model of online education tries to partly solve the issue of quality teachers and systematic training.
The other issue is about an enormous number of students plying for competitive exams in India every year with a media report pegging the figure at 70 million. A large number majority of these come from villages and small towns, and have one aim cracking such exams, be it for entry to higher education or for government jobs.
Indian metro’s have mushrooming coaching classes but lack quality of teachers while non-metro’s have inadequate providers for specialised private coaching. This underlines a new space for online education providers and very aptly the KPMG Google report published in 2017 noted that the online education market will be worth $1.96 billion by 2021. In addition to this the test-prep market for government jobs in India seems to be close to $3 billion in India, with over 50 million aspirants.
While Byju’s took online education to masses in a way its peers could not, ‘IxamBee’ a Delhi-based EduTech startup started in April 2017 created learning material for competitive tests specially designed for students living in rural and semi-urban areas of the country. It uses text, audio, and video formats to create unlimited and free mock test attempts for about 55 competitive exams. Sensing opportunities in this sector, Online giant ‘Amazon’ has launched its first EduTech product for the Indian market by introducing the JEE Ready app in beta phase, which lets students take free mock tests for their preparation of Indian engineering test, the IIT-JEE. This app has been released on the Google Play Store by Amazon Mobile LLC last month and has over 1 thousand installs since then.
Unlike other Indian education startups that either work in the in-school learning segment or provide test preparation learning solutions, Delhi-based EduTech startup ‘Eupheus’ tries to bridge the gap between in-school and at-home learning by providing end-to-end education solutions to schools from pre-kindergarten levels through their portfolio of curriculum solutions, reference books and at-home digital solutions. The impact of this novelty turned highly successful.
In its second year of operations in March 2019 it has grown to approx. INR 60 crore of revenue and managed to reach over 3.3 mln students through 3700 schools with a team of 125 people planning to impact more than 10 million students lives over the next five years.
The change seems clear. Old school models in education are being disrupted with new-age technology and innovations, driving opportunities for a variety of EduTech businesses in India. Instances like DaaD, Byju’s, IxamBee, Amazon and Eupheus found their unique spaces for their EdTech entrepreneurial pursuits while trying to solve address some vital impediments in education to an extent.
By the end of 2018 alone, India’s EduTech startups have received close to USD $700M funding and this is field will further explode. Currently it is presumed that there are more than 40 EduTech startup companies in India, but none of them could match Byju’s scale. The success stories of DaaD, Eupheus and Byju’s underlines enough the transforming phases in India where advanced technology advancement has given a new definition to our education system.
