Veda (knowledge) + Tantu (network)
By using Vedantu, Institutions and Publishers can instantly deploy their content on Mobiles, accelerating their Go to Market and also save on internal Mobile IT infrastructure costs. By relying on Vedantu’s robust suggestive algorithms its clients can make their content more relevant for end users and enhance their business in the process.
Launching pilot programs around May 2013, Vedantu enables any Educational enterprise to launch their own Learning Apps. These can be professional training institutes, Schools/Universities, Educational Publishing houses or any teacher. Through its Vedantu powered app, Institute/Teacher can launch marketplace of their paid/free Courses on Mobile/Tablet devices for students – increasing their reach and business. For students, this app enables ‘real-time’
a) Discussion
b) Doubt sharing
c) Assessment
d) Feedback
e) Connecting teachers and students
The Team
Team Vedantu – fondly called ‘Vedans’
Vedantu hired Mr Sriram Narayanan to lead Vedantu as its CEO. Mr Sriram Narayanan comes from over 20 years of experience in technology domain having worked extensively all over the world on cutting edge technologies with companies like CA, Oracle, Microsoft. On his last assignment, he was VP Corporate strategic Alliances at Pearsons Education. Founders are:
1. Anand Prakash (B.Tech – IIT-Roorkee) – Academic Content Development
2. Pulkit Jain (B.Tech – IIT-Roorkee) – Product Design
3. Saurabh Saxena (B.Tech – IIT-Roorkee) – HR, Finance and Business Development
4. Vamsi Krishna (B.Tech – IIT-Bombay) – Business Development
5. Ujjawal Misra (B.Tech – IIIT – Allahabad) – Technology Architect
Vedantu was the second startup they have had laid hands on, the first was Lakshya started by the first 4 founders in the list above. In the role of teacher, they taught and interacted with more than 10,000 students. In next 6 years, they successfully scaled the operations to over 5 locations with a team size of more than 150 catering to over 3000 students/year. Today Lakshya institute is North Indis’s Top IIT & Medical entrance examination training institute. In 2012, the founders sold the majority stake of Lakshya to a listed educational conglomerate MTEducare at an evaluation of INR 300Million
Marketing, Planning & Competition
Mobile based learning is a strong trend which will become mainstream in few years. With prices of these devices dropping and internet penetration exponentially rising, students will heavily rely on mobiles/tablets for consumption of educational content. Vedantu is perfectly placed to disrupt here. Mobile Learning Industry is expected to unleash itself in next 2 years and cross a USD 10 billion mark.
Vedantu delivers high quality products and products are already crunched with both Indian as well as European customers. The basic difference between Indian market and abroad would be the awareness and readiness for such things. Web LMSes are very common in US/Europe universities and they are desperately looking for Mobile Learning solutions, for them it’s a matter of necessity whereas in India it’s still not a ‘Must Have’. Indian universities don’t see value in investing in it and hence still play around with free open source LMSes like Moodle.
[highlight]To counter this the team has:[/highlight]
1) Moved into international markets and are pitching our product to institutes who already heavily use LMSes.
2) For India, instead of taking per user cost (which clients are uncomfortable with) , the startup has tweaked their business model and have gone into a transaction share model (which customers agree because it translates into generation of additional revenues for them as well).
The fact which makes us different is instead of asking clients to come on our platform and host courses etc, we customize and empower them to create their own learning Apps, built with its own marketplace where our clients can host and sell courses. Instead of charging upfront from our clients, we encourage them to reach more students and sell courses on mobiles/tablets and we take a revenue share out of that. This approach and positioning is what makes us different.
Vedantu till now
[pullquote align=”right”]We have added some big names from India and Abroad into our customer list. We have recently launched with Career Launcher, one of the biggest test prep Institutes of India, we have gone live with a large conglomerate in Europe and also added McGraw Hill Education from the publisher domain and going live with them in April[/pullquote]
Career Launcher is a leading Test prep player of our country. After seeing Vedantu App they readily agreed to launch their educational Mobile App for a select section of students for testing. They received such an awesome feedback that CL decided to go ahead and launch an app for everyone with paid courses. Vedantu is currently LIVE with CL App. Click here to see this app.
In addition, Vedantu are in final stage talks with some of the biggest names in distance learning domain, Skill development domain and Publishing domain and will see a lot of traction starting April this year.
More than 15000 end users are a part of their beta currently and are targeting 20-25 customers by mid-2014 of the year and a potential end user base of more than 3 lac users.
Eagle’s eye: Future perspective
Vedantu says they were very fortunate to get amazing guys with aptitude but more importantly the start-up attitude. Apart from team the initial excitement also revolved around ideation and bringing the concept to life. As they grew the challenge shifted towards building a minimum viable product which can be marketed. Once the beta is ready the most important thing was taking it to the market, getting feedback and re-iterating on the product.
The biggest hurdle for any EdTech company is monetization. People will all go very excited about the product and the possibilities of it at a theoretical level but when it comes to paying for it, that when the real challenge begins.
Education is a very wide domain and hence Vamsi say “Be very specific, pick up a clearly defined use case and solve it rather than becoming very broad. Monetization is a huge challenge esp in EdTech hence my second advice would be to keep an eye out for that and not burn out too soon. Also it’s very easy to get excited about technology in education but the hard fact remains about its adoption. Edupreneurs need to remember that the challenge of technology in education is not of technology but of its adoption. Hence one needs to be patient and give it time to set in, we cannot expect overnight adoption and results hence my third advice would be to choose the market right. One should quickly be able to access where does the product make most sense to be launched (geography/age group)”
Recently, the team demoed at Startup Saturday Bangalore, and has to say this regarding the experience :
“Awesome. I feel that such startup networking events give a lot of opportunity for everyone to showcase what one is doing and get live feedback from fellow entrepreneurs. Bangalore has also been a hub of startup activity and such events really go a long way in creating a conducive ecosystem for startups to grow.”
TTP’s take on Vedantu
By using Vedantu, Institutions and Publishers can instantly deploy the content on mobiles. The founding team’s prior experience has definitely helped in finding the market and the team has excellent strategy in terms of reaching Indian and Global Audiences in a different way. We wish Team@Vedantu the very best!
