The Noida-based exam preparation platform Gradeup that helps students prepare for undergraduate and postgraduate courses has recently raised $7 million in a Series A round from Times Internet and $3 million in a seed round. The company is planning to utilise the funds to expand its academic team to 100 faculty members from 50 at present and 200 subject matters and reach smaller cities and towns in India.
Gradeup was started four years ago as a community of students helping one another in solving questions. While this feature is still available, Gradeup has also started offering courses from to teachers to help students prepare for exams.
Shobhit Bhatnagar, the Co-founder & CEO of Gradeup in a conversation with Techcrunch said…
“These are live lectures that are designed to replicate the offline experience,”
“The startup offers dozens of courses and runs multiple sessions in English and Hindi languages. As many as 200 students tune into a class simultaneously.”
The platform offers a medium for students to interact with the teachers. Each class also has a ‘Student Success Rate’ team that follows up with each student to keep check of problems in learning any concept. Gradeup has recorded a 50 percent increase in the course completion rate by allotting student success rate teams.
Satyam Gajwani, Vice Chairman of Times Internet said…
“India has over 200 million students that spend over $90 billion on different educational services. These have primarily been served offline, where the challenge is maintaining high quality while expanding access,”
Gajwani further added…
“The first wave of online solutions were built around on-demand video content, either free or paid. Today, the next wave is online live courses like Gradeup, with teacher-student interactivity, personalisation and adaptive learning strategies, delivering high-quality solutions that scale, which is particularly valuable in semi-urban and rural markets,”
“These match or better the experience quality of offline education, while being more cost-effective. This trend will keep growing in India, where online live education will grow very quickly for test prep, reskilling and professional learning,”
Commenting on the investment, Bhatnagar said…
“Students even in smaller cities and towns are paying a hefty amount of fee and are unable to get access to high-quality teachers, this is exactly the void we can fill.”
ⓘ Image Source: TechCrunch
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