Startup Mantra: Bringing technology into classrooms
This Pune-based startup is bringing two most essential verticals in a student’s life together – education and technology – to deliver educational content from a new technological perspective
Education system in India has been criticised for its rote learning approach, lack of practical application, inadequate infrastructure, and limited access to quality education. Despite some positive developments in recent years, such as increased government spending and the introduction of new-age technologies, the education system in India still faces significant challenges. On one hand, traditional teaching methods are not reaching students the way they should, while on the other hand educational technology is still evolving. School management is facing challenges like a lack of management tools for informed decision-making, the inability to conduct seamless online classes, unavailability of highly skilled and trained teachers, a tedious examination process, an ineffective system of parent communication, and many more. Addressing this market-gap, Jai Decosta and Aniket Palav, co-founded Ed-Tech ‘Let’s Eduvate’ in 2020 and backed by K12 Techno Services, catering to a broad canvas of schools and bringing two most essential verticals in a student’s life together – education and technology – to deliver educational content from a new technological perspective.
In the beginning…
A Chartered Accountant and an entrepreneur with over 17 years of experience, Decosta did his MBA from IIM, Bangalore before scaling up his first venture K12 Techno Services. His colleague and investment banker Palav, who has done BE Electronics and MBA in Finance, has an overall experience of 15 years. The duo launched their spinoff ‘Let’s Eduvate’ in 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic when most schools were facing several problems.
Says Palav, “Before starting Eduvate services, we were providing full-fledged management services to schools. We had 80 schools as our clients with about 60,000 students base. These schools were using our management services including starting a school, managing their daily operations, managing academics, etc. It was a capital-intensive model. For the academic part, we were taking books from outside publications and customising them based on our curriculum requirements. At that time we had about 3,000 teachers and we used to make lesson plans for those teachers based on books sourced from outside publications. Since we had the scale, we thought why not make our own books, like a customised set for ourselves instead of relying on outer publications.”
“We started making books and had a stable curriculum. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, we thought we must diversify our business. In August that year, we thought of taking our curriculum to state board and CBSE board schools also. However, we were focused on adding value to the schools instead of just being publications providing books. We started identifying schools that would want such services and we realised that there are a lot of schools with an average student strength of 350, who are unable to scale up due to various issues. Managing schools seems easy, but if you are unable to scale up fast, then the management is stuck. They cannot simply shut down the school and do not have any idea of increasing their student strength and being cost-effective. We wanted to be cost-effective and help schools scale up with our expertise. With this vision, we started Let’s Eduvate,” said Palav.
Product-market fit
Finding a product-market fit, even for seasoned and serial entrepreneurs, is not an easy task. When Decosta and Palav took their product to the market, they realised this reality very soon.
Palav said, “Although we had decided to go with a more elaborate product instead of just giving lesson plans like other publications, we got a cold response from most of the schools. The Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak and schools were struggling to survive. We were confident that our product will add value to the schools and that we can scale it up, but we found no takers till about December 2020. Meanwhile, we got our own tech and CRM platform built. With this technological platform, we had our own books and lesson plans for teachers and our own in-house designed teacher training module.”
“We had put a small team of about 5 to 10 people to test the market and take our product to schools. With slightly more affordable pricing we were expecting some traction immediately. We were positioning ourselves as one who would not only help schools in implementing the curriculum but also in achieving some degree of the scale. We experimented in Maharashtra and Karnataka market but got very little traction till December, despite those regions being familiar to us as a market,” added Palav.
“After December 2020 till February 2021, we were able to create interest in schools and they could also see real value in our offerings. This traction was enough to prove that there was a demand for our product and there were takers for the product even in the toughest times. We signed about 23 schools by February 2021 for the implementation in the academic year 2021-2022,” said Palav.
Palav stated, “Our entire content is uploaded in the tab for easy access and the teacher could display the resources like videos, PPTs, etc., on the TV in the classroom thus helping the students and teachers. In case the classrooms are equipped with smart boards and have Wi-Fi connectivity, then the teachers could use the resources directly from the ERP to explain to the students. Eduvate is built on a robust and scalable cloud-based infrastructure, which enables it to handle the demands of large-scale education programmes.”
Implementation
The duo formed a curriculum implementation team comprising academics and operations executives. This team was responsible for the handholding of schools during the implementation period. Aniket says this sample size gave them the confidence that they can go a bit more aggressively in terms of product sales.
Aniket stated, “In August 2021, we formed a larger team for sales comprising about 50 executives. We also expanded our target geographies from just two states to seven states. We were able to sign up 300 schools which are currently in the implementation phase of the academic year 2022-23. With this success, we were quite sure that there is latent demand in the market and if we did a fair job, then we may get a further push.”
“Accordingly, for the academic year 2023-24 we have increased our sales team to 140 executives who would cover 13 states across the country. We aim to target more schools and this year till date we have been able to onboard 400 schools. In the next two months, we expect this number to grow by 200 schools. With a strong curriculum implementation team of just 80 members, we are catering to a huge number of schools. Eduvate is a powerful tool for enhancing the teaching and learning experience. Its flexible, user-friendly design makes it easy for teachers to create and deliver engaging online courses,” explained Palav.
Aniket said, “Besides onboarding new schools, our business model also relies heavily on the renewal of previously onboarded schools. For example, if we are onboarding 600 new schools this academic year 2023-24, and if we can renew some previously onboarded schools, then we will keep adding to the total. Our target is to have 1,500 schools on our platform within next two years. With that target, we will cater to at least 5 lakh students.”
Market size
Explaining the business potential, Decosta said, “The market size is quite big in terms of schools. There are about 60 crore students in India. Some states are heavily regulated in terms of curriculum and hence we are expanding thoughtfully. Our solution has proven to be effective in engaging students in their learning process by making it more joyful and interesting, as well as easy to understand. It is now being used by various schools in India and many more are joining the league. We are catering to private and unaided section of the schools. Further, we cater only to schools which are having ₹20,000 to ₹40,000 fee structure, and if we do not then it would become difficult to schools which would not afford the ₹3,000 product.