An IPO, an acquisition, and now his third startup has $3M to crack elearning

Many a startup have found the highly regulated education space in India a tough nut to crack. Despite the obvious advantages of edtech, selling new ideas to schools and colleges is time-consuming and frustrating.

“The sales cycle is too long in this space. Sometimes, it takes six months to get a new client,” entrepreneur Chaitanya Chitta told Tech in Asia in an earlier interview. Chaitanya co-founded edtech startup Smarton, which shut down early this year despite having a few big clients. “You are dependent on the whims and fancies of the owners or the management of these educational institutions,” he said.

Government regulations add another layer of complexity. That’s why most edtech startups like Embibe and Toppr have focused on exam prep, which is consumer-oriented and independent from the education establishment.

Mumbai-based Schoolguru is an exception. It works with 12 universities across India to help them provide elearning to their students. The universities can plug into the Schoolguru platform, which saves them the hassles of setting up elearning infrastructure, creating courses, and managing students online. The platform has video lectures by 1,500 professors and academics from all over India as well as abroad, which universities can use to build courses in English and other languages.

Today Schoolguru announced a series A funding round of INR 200 million (US$3 million) from individual investors in India and the US. It plans to reach 25 to 30 universities in all the major states of India over the next couple of years. Universities in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are also on its radar.

Schoolguru CEO and co-founder Shantanu Rooj says:

We wish to revolutionize the distance education scenario in India and abroad at an affordable cost. We want to offer the services of our platform not only to open distance learning students but also to students enrolling for traditional classroom education. We would like bring a change in the classroom education in several remote areas of the country with technology support.

A natural progression

An alumnus of IIT and IIM, Shantanu Rooj has had a long, successful entrepreneurial journey stretching back 17 years, when he founded his first startup with friends in Kolkata. This documentation software company had an IPO in 2005, after which he started Broadllyne. The second venture began as a broadband internet service provider but quickly morphed into a provider of IT services to institutions. The company had over 200 institutional clients when it was acquired in 2009.

So the launch of Schoolguru in 2012 as a provider of elearning services to educational institutions was a natural progression for Shantanu and his co-founders Ravi Rangan and Anil Bhat. Before the launch of Schoolguru, all three worked together in senior positions at egovernance service provider Glodyne, whose clients included several educational institutions.