India’s internet almost killed them. An edtech startup’s journey to top of the class

Lovleen Bhatia (L) and Kapil Tyagi (R), Edureka’s founders.

When I was in university, I swallowed up credits like the undergraduate personification of gluttony. I wanted the freshman 22. As in 22 class units per semester. I know what you’re thinking. You’re right – there was definitely something wrong with my reasoning. After three or four semesters of putting myself through this particular circle of hell, I realized quantity doesn’t mean quality. After graduation, I noticed internships contributed more to my education than many of the times I sat in class, listening to theory and not putting it into practice.

That’s the problem that Lovleen Bhatia and Kapil Tyagi wanted to solve about seven years ago: one-way lecturing without any practical application. They had a vision to give people access to online education, but go beyond watching videos that can easily be tuned out. They wanted their students to be able to interact with their instructors online, and they didn’t want to be too academic – they wanted to teach practical skills like iOS app development.

“Me and my co-founder both went to premier colleges in India, and we were not very satisfied with the education we were getting,” Lovleen tells Tech in Asia. Lovleen is a graduate of IIT Varanasi, while Kapil is an alum of IIT Bombay. “When we started working, we saw that there was a lot of information available for people, but it wasn’t very structured,” he says.

While trying to enrich his education, Lovleen found his experiences with YouTube educational videos to be unstructured and unengaging. When he turned to online courses, he found most of them to be review courses that didn’t involve interaction. “If you have questions in-between [classes], you cannot ask,” he explains.

Edureka, the startup which Lovleen founded with Kapil n 2011, tries to address these issues through a practical and interactive approach to online learning. Instructors may be academics, but they have real experience in their fields. Classes happen over video chat, much like Skype, and the site includes 24/7 support. When students finish their classes, they have a recording they can review.

The startup currently hosts 80 courses on subjects including technology, business, and marketing. It also offers certification courses, much like competitors Simplilearn and EduPristine.

Road to graduation

Photo credit: CollegeDegrees360.

Edureka had a rocky start, though, because its classes require high-speed internet connections that just didn’t exist in India back when it started. Lovleen found people far less receptive to online classes than they are today. He tried pilot courses to get people interested in taking more classes, but the startup almost folded several times. In 2013, the number of people using the service began to pick up, and the founders could rest a little easier as they graduated to another level of operation. In 2015, Business Today ranked it second on its list of coolest 5-year old startups.

Lovleen considers instructor quality to be one of the biggest advantages of Edureka, and in his opinion, it’s what ultimately kept the company afloat. He claims that Edureka courses have a completion rate of 70 percent, as opposed to the current massive open online course (MOOC) average of 15 percent.

Part of that completion rate may be due to the startup’s business model, which makes the students pay in advance for their classes. Unlike a free course site like Code School, which lets students pay one blanket fee to access a library of courses, Edureka students pay per class. Depending on the course and the instructor, classes can range from US$150 to US$400. Teachers get paid a portion of that per class, and that portion is set on a case-by-case basis with the company.

He says that the startup currently serves 50,000 subscribers in 70 countries, with the largest number of students logging on from India and the US, followed by Singapore, Australia, Southeast Asian countries, and the UK.

Class is in session

Lovleen’s vision for the company’s expansion includes growing the student base geographically and widening the variety of course offerings. He hopes that users will have access to 250 classes – about three times the site’s current offering – by December this year. Areas added will include healthcare, language, finance, and management. Edureka is a bootstrapped company, but for now, Lovleen says the payment model seems to work well for them.