Disrupting the Ed-Tech market. Vedantu, founded by four IITians.

Vedantu is a platform that provides personalized LIVE Online Tutoring for students from class 6th to class 12th. It offers a range of monthly tuitions, IIT Foundation, preparations for the exams like JEE, PSA, NTSE and many others. Vedantu democratizes the teaching by using technology to create a marketplace of Teachers.

Students are allowed to choose their own tutor and time preference is provided to the users. To disrupt the ed-tech market of startups in India, Vedantu has come up with a new in-house technology which is a custom built called ‘WAVE’ which stands for ‘Whiteboard, Audio and Video Technology.’ The platform focuses on live 1 to 1 tutoring between teacher and a student. In a nutshell, Vedantu wants to bring the offline tutoring experience online.

Before starting with Vedantu, the four IITians, Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Saurabh Saxena and Anand Prakash launched a startup called Lakshya in 2006 which was a test preparation and training company. Lakshya was later on acquired by a listed company called MTEducare in 2012.

These four childhood friends unknowingly started the journey of making Vedantu a decade ago. Earlier, Vamsi from IIT Mumbai who is also with Pulkit, Saurabh, and Anand from IIT Roorkee gave into their parents pressure and started working for a corporate firm. But they always felt like fish out of the water in their corporate jobs. Soon Anand resigned and the other followed him. With some teaching experience of Summer Camp, they started their journey in the education sector. Vamsi says, "We wanted to do something meaningful together in education space because we shared the passion for it. All the work done in Lakshya our first venture, early in years, germinated into a bigger idea in the form of our second venture – Vedantu. Having ourselves worked in the offline space, we realized the limitations of brick and mortar model."

Thanks to the sudden uprising of Digital India created by the current government and ever increasing internet infrastructure has provided Vedantu with tools to connect and mobilise more students and teachers giving our country an effective form of learning. Vamsi adds, "We aim to provide tutors with incentives, which are not available in an institutionalised set-up. One of the teachers on our platform has made up to Rs. 98,000 in a month."

The idea behind Vedantu was always to make a large sizable impact. Founders of the platform were very clear in building a product to make a difference and they were certain that the money will follow and it has. Vedantu has received a total of $5.55 Million in 3 rounds from two investors. With the funding, the founders are soon going to launch a mobile app, along with extending their operations and to develop a system where they would be able to operate large number live tutoring concurrently.

The platform has clocked in more than 30,000 hours of live learning with more than 23,000 registered students from 70 cities which include six foreign cities from the US, UAE, and Japan. Not only this but they have more than 200 teachers on board and the numbers are just increasing rapidly. Anand Daniel from Accel Partners, an early stage and has huge portfolio of early stage investments in some ground breaking startup ideas, states that Vedantu has huge potential. He says that tutoring market size in India was around $11 billion last year and he adds that there are very few teams in India like Vedantu with a great sense for the education sector as well as technology for effective scaling.

Devesh Chawla is the author of this article on Business Mentors. Find more information, about Business Startup Ideas