After China and the United States, India has emerged as one of the top three countries in the world for venture capital funding in the edtech digital market
As schools and universities in India were forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic, students turned to digital learning, and Kopykitab, a digital learning site, experienced server overload. Sumeet Verma, the company’s co-founder, says that there was so much unforeseen demand for his company’s online education services over the last year that his system couldn’t keep up. Mr Verma, who is also the CEO of the Bangalore-based company that provides online classes and e-books, says, “We had several instances of our cloud server being choked with traffic.” “It was a fun issue to work on.”
With the support of investors such as the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Kopykitab has grown its monthly active customers from 800,000 before the pandemic to 2.8 million now. “It takes time to change shopper behaviour, but the pandemic accelerated everything,” Mr Verma says. Prior to that, he notes, India’s training know-how market was “evolving.” Firms like his have identified themselves as “long-term thinkers.” According to a report released in April by RBSA Advisers, India’s EdTech sector is expected to grow in value to $30 billion over the next decade, from $735 million to $800 million in 2019.
This expands online education access in a country with one of the world’s largest school systems and a population of 430 million people aged six to 23. More startups have entered the market in the last year, providing much-needed digital lessons during the pandemic. Even so, India’s EdTech market is still in its infancy compared to the US and China, which means there is still a lot of room for expansion. Investors were eager to join the bandwagon. Devendra Agrawal, founder and CEO of Dexter Capital Advisers, says that Indian EdTech has been on investors’ radar for some time. The technology available for promoting uninterrupted learning is nothing short of awe-inspiring, thanks to a futuristic approach. New educational technology, when combined with ease and cooperation, has resulted in a more refined process of information acquisition. While the technicality of technology-driven innovation is being simplified for the end user, the vast majority of students and teachers are already using EdTech tools to their full potential. Byju’s, Google, Khan Academy, and upGrad are only a few of the many visionary ventures that are helping to meet the changing needs of education in the twenty-first century.
This expands online education access in a country with one of the world’s largest school systems and a population of 430 million people aged six to 23. More startups have entered the market in the last year, providing much-needed digital lessons during the pandemic. Even so, India’s EdTech market is still in its infancy compared to the US and China, which means there is still a lot of room for expansion. Investors were eager to join the bandwagon. Devendra Agrawal, founder and CEO of Dexter Capital Advisers, says that Indian EdTech has been on investors’ radar for some time.
