[This article is a part of our First Person series, in which people share their stories and thoughts about their startups, lives and careers.]
EduRev, which means Education Revolution, is more of a vision than an idea. EduRev began with the motive of bringing tech into the tech-deprived Indian education and revolutionizing it in this manner. We say it is more of a vision because even though the idea or the means to achieve it changed, the central theme or the fire to bring a change through EdTech remained.
I started with selling ERP to schools with a young heart and a mission to change. But as we jumped into the field we realized that Indian Education was more disorganized than imagined. A simple ERP could never achieve the ultimate mission.
So after a small hiatus and the fire to change still burning bright, we jumped into the startup arena again but this time we weren’t naive but we were rather prepared to tame the untamable Indian Education.
With disruption the only thing in head, we started with a simple hack. A platform for teachers and students to share notes, ultimately building a common crowdsourced educational library for all. To put it in an analogy, a youtube for documents of Indian Education.
Even though the goal was clear, the path was not. Teachers even the ones who liked the idea were apprehensive for sharing content for free. The logic was simple, we work hard for something so it cannot be given for free. We agreed.
This became the genesis of our first model, a crowdsourced marketplace for courses of Indian Education. For building the structure we were working closely with the teachers and as it happens after spending a decent amount of time being entrepreneurs, you naturally get into the knack of solving problems.
So while building initial courses with teachers for selling on our platform, we started solving other problems we could for them via intervention of IT. And from one thing leading to another we built up a complete SaaS based white label solution for teachers which solved in house problems of institutions.
After that teachers were testing their students on our platform, using our algorithms to analyze students automating things which required personal attention before. They started getting almost futuristic replacing printing and distributing of papers by sharing notes via the EduRev app and web platform. And even auto generated reports and notifications were going to parents and students via emails and SMS.
Now within a year of our incorporation we have over 40,000 students registered on the platform with 70,000+ docs, videos and tests available. We get over 2,00,000 hits a month with total hits till date more than 1.5 Million. We have 300+ teachers registered and also have 25+ institutions who have purchased our SaaS based White Label Platform. This has been our journey and story so far.
We are now venturing into implementing our SaaS model in Schools and are also in discussions to implement this across a complete State of India. In Parallel we are also ‘secretly’ working on a model which will make the complete basic Indian Education available free of cost on EduRev with monetization via our technology and data generated.
EduRev was lucky enough to be initially backed and funded by Jaarvis Accelerator where we were actively groomed and nurtured. Now we are raising a Pre Series A round to prove profitability of each model. Last weekwe were joined by Pradeep Reddy Kamasani who is an investor from Hyderabad Angels, he will be helping EduRev in expansion to South India.
To conclude, I personally feel that EdTech is the most disorganized and problematic sector out of all but that also makes it the one with maximum potential and scope. We are now able to build something after finding a pattern in the erratic behavior. The way in which we differentiate is that we are not replacing any entity of the Education System but facilitating each of the present one. We intend to stop only when the ‘Edu-Rev’ goal is achieved.
[The author of this post is Kunaal Satija, the founder of EduRev]