Bangalore-based Vedantu, a startup aiming to disrupt the way Indian kids take tuitions, has grabbed a $5 million Series A round from Accel Partners and Tiger Global. The startup scooped in this Series A round within just 6 months of its launch.
Before we get to the main story, there’s a quite a lot of logic and meaning to Vedantu’s name itself. Vedantu is a word which the founders derived from two Sanskrit words, Veda and Tantu. Veda, which represents ancient Sanskrit manuscripts implies knowledge while Tantu implies Network.
Founded by Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Saurabh Saxena & Anand Prakash, Vedantu is an online platform which provides live, real-time tutoring to students studying in Grade 6 to Grade 12. Vedantu’s offerings range from providing monthly tuitions (for both CBSE and ICSE board students) to more specific, entrance exam related tuitions. The startup provides live tutoring for almost all of the major entrance examinations in India along with tuitions for various National level Olympiads.
The startup is conceptualized to bring Personalization back into Education. Its founders say, that they imagine a world where a student will be at the center of learning again. Where a teacher will teach according to the need, pace and level of a student. Where learning graduates from One-to-Many to 1-to-1. And yes, that is petty much the issue with the outdated education scenario in most parts of India.
Talking about the recent round, CEO Vamsi Krishna says,
Our technology simulates a live session across the desk interaction between a teacher and a student giving them an experience as if they were sitting across each other. Being an online platform gives the convenience to both teacher and student to teach and learn from their own different locations across India thus breaking down demographic barriers
Vedantu has technology and research at its core. The startup has developed a system, which is intelligent enough to gauge a student’s requirement – contextually map with best suited teacher – that too in real time. The entire environment provided by Vedantu has been built from scratch, and has been named WAVE (Whiteboard Audio Video Environment). And they are continuously evolving the system through the massive feedback they receive from the student and teaching community.
The tutoring at Vedantu is a complete live personalized interaction between a student and a teacher using their custom built whiteboard, audio and video technology.
The entire platform can be run at even low-bandwidth internet speeds, which will give Vedantu a serious edge, considering how majority of world’s fastest growing smartphone population still rely on 2G internet speeds due to expensive high-speed internet.
Talking about their plans with the current round, Vamsi says,
With the funding received, we want to create a system where a student can choose a suitable teacher in real time. We want to extend the experience to tablets and mobile form factor devices with scalability which can seamlessly run 100s of live learning sessions concurrently
However, what’s even more exciting about Vedantu, as compared to other similar ed-tech startups, is the fact that the firm has been founded by teachers themselves. Why do I find this exciting ? Well, an ed-tech startup composed of founders who have an equally in-depth experience in tech as well as teaching, is probably just the right firm to bring about a change in India’s education scenario. How far they go, that’s for time to tell.
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