NEW DELHI: Somnath Mondal wants to land a decent job but the 17-year-old from Basirhat, West Bengal is daunted by the preparations needed to crack competitive exams.
Mondal has been at the top of his class at a Bengali-medium school in his hometown but proficiency in the English language has not been one of his major strengths. Mondal, however, is just one of millions of people in India facing similar issues.
“The education industry is going through a massive digital transformation and India’s education opportunity is one of the largest in the world and Bharat’s vernacular education market is a $30 billion, need-based, white space,” said Karanvir Singh founder & CEO at Pariksha, one of India’s largest vernacular edtech startup with a clear focus on the rural and semi-urban market.
With over four million users with over 1.5 lakh paid subscribers, the startup is solving the large and deep-rooted problem of affordability and accessibility of quality education for the mobile-first internet users of Bharat. Similarly, another startup ImaginXP, a higher education platform that provides degree and subjects to university and college partners, is trying to plug the employability gap through a B2B model. It was founded by Shishir Kumar and Shashank Shwet in 2013.
“India has 120 million students who can’t afford a degree. Out of the 38.5 million who can afford one, only 11 million will get a job. This is the drastic state of higher education in the country,” said Shashank Shwet, co-founder and CEO at ImaginXP. “We are a social impact organization that provides embedded degree, online work integrated degree and subjects to universities in a B2B model.”
ExtraaEdge and ByteLearn are two other startups in the edtech space that have gone beyond vanilla operations. Founded in 2015 by Sushil Mundada and Abhishek Ballabh, ExtraaEdge for instance, is working to tap the education marketing industry with its new-age, vertical SaaS marketing technology that helps the industry increase, manage, and predict their admissions while automating their entire sales and lead processes.
And while ExtraaEdge is powering around 300 education brands across India, USA, UAE and the UK, AI-powered startup, ByteLearn is trying to revolutionize education by building an AI assistant for math teachers and students.
“Teachers are struggling to provide immediate and personalized feedback, track individual knowledge gaps and provide practice to remediate gaps, while students are lacking the immediate, short, targeted help they need while solving math problems. Looking at this opportunity, Byte an AI assistant to do the heavy lifting for teachers,” said an industry expert.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
