Ed-tech players shape the future of learning in India

DeepThought EduTech Ventures

Passionate about research and modernisation, 30-year-old Hyderabad-based Tarun Ayitam founded DeepThought in March 2020 when ed-tech start-ups became the buzzword.

“It is encouraging that India has over 2,000 deep-tech start-ups as per the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM),” says its Director Ayitam.

“DeepThought works with the vision of transforming schools and colleges into research institutions, where a child grows as a researcher,” says Ayitam, who has a decade of experience in business innovation.

“The technology was built with the premise to help teachers in nurturing research-focused classrooms. They get on-demand assistance on academic decisions.”

While features like thread-builder acquaint the educator with the flow of the discussion in the classroom, eagle-builder gives a birds-eye view of the discourse. Nudging a tutor to explore further helps them have an asynchronous discussion with the students beyond the class hours.

“These two features on the platform led Grade 4 students present exciting ideas like thought leadership, lean start-up and asset-light finance models during our Socratic conversations. They were trained by college students who had never taught before,” Ayitam, who began teaching at the age of 16, says.

“It was good to see that a lot of youngsters were passionate about working for start-ups and parents were also eager to have a dialogue with new ventures,” he adds.

“Enthusiasm created by the government is quite positive. Entrepreneurship education is growing and we may have more progressive educational companies taking off in the next few years.”

Vidyakul

Trying to solve the issue of affordability and accessibility of quality education for students from lower-income households, Tarun Saini, 31, founded Vidyakul. His start-up offers content learning for students from Grade 9 to 12 in vernacular languages.

Growing up in a village in Haryana, Saini, as a student, travelled about 35 kms for tuitions to the nearest town. The opportunity to work in Australia’s government-funded education space – delivering door-to-door affordable learning literature to people – led him to venture into this sector.

“On returning to India in 2018, I found that despite the growth of online learning, the situation had not improved in villages and small towns. Children continued to travel afar for basic tuitions,” Saini says.

He worked on an e-platform for those having smartphones, but had limited spending power. However, with students having no awareness of accessing online education, the concept failed. He also found out that most online and offline quality education platforms were in English, therefore, communication was the weak link.

Saini spent months researching and developing the product, anticipating it would not face rejection.

During the pandemic, when online education got a leg-up, Saini launched the Vidyakul app with the tagline ‘Bharat Ka Online School’ in May 2020. It swung its focus on vernacular content on top of the ever-evolving technology.

“I created study material in Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi, as spoken in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.”

Also discovering that the demand-supply gap in after-school learning for state board students was massive, Vidyakul collaborated with different state boards and reached out to millions of students in rural areas.

It intends to soon introduce courses and categories for Karnataka, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu boards. ●