E-commerce giant Amazon has forayed into the online education space in India. Amazon India is currently running a test preparation platform called Amazon Academy, focused on preparing for the IIT-JEE engineering entrance exams for students of Classes 11 and 12.
According to its website, JEE Ready has rebranded itself to Amazon Academy. It is not clear whether this is a startup Amazon acquired or previously owned.
Amazon Academy is in beta mode, meaning it has still not formally launched to all consumers. Academy runs test series for students, and is primarily meant to supplement their existing classes and preparations for the engineering exam.
In response to Moneycontrol's queries, an Amazon spokesperson said, "Following the release of the JEE Ready app on the Play Store in Dec 2019, Amazon is continuing to test an offering for students preparing for JEE. We will come back with more details on this soon."
While the content is currently available for free, Amazon says in a questionnaire on its website that this is only for a few months.
Education technology has been a huge beneficiary of the COVID-19 pandemic as millions of students have been forced to learn online instead of going for offline classes. While the sector was burgeoning anyway, the pandemic has turbocharged growth.
To this effect, most ed-tech startups have reported manifold growth in users and revenue, and have raised money at successively higher valuations in just a few months. Byju’s, the largest player in the space is currently valued at $11 billion compared to $5 billion at the beginning of the year, while Unacademy has tripled its valuation to $1.45 billion in the last six months. Vedantu too, is raising at a valuation of about $800 million, compared to $125 million in the beginning of the year.
