Kerala start-up Entri eyeing 5 million users in 12 months

Kerala-based startup Entri, an app which offers learning content for job seekers in local languages, is eyeing 5 million users in the next 12 months.

At least 1.6 million users have used Entri so far and the platform is now adding 6,000 aspirants every day, targetting 5 million users in the next 12 months and 10 million users in the next 18 months, Co Founder & CEO of of the Kochi-based Entri, Mohammed Hisamuddin said.

Entri recently raised a seed funding of 1.4 million USD led by Good Capital, an early-stage venture investment firm, with a number of other investments in companies facing Tier-2 India users, including Meesho and SimSim, it said in a press release.

The round also saw participation from investors in the US and China. Working on the principle that leaning concepts are the most effective when done in the native languages, Entri decided to tap the huge gap.

At Entri, it was noticed that when quality content is provided to people in their mother tongue, they understand and grasp it far better than English, he said.

The platform has so far seen users consume more than 1 crore minutes of video lessons and 27 crore questions practised in local languages-- Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada and Hindi. Founded by Mohammed Hisamuddin and Rahul Ramesh in 2017, Entri app provides different types of learning content -- mock/adaptive tests, flashcards and video lessons in local languages for job aspirants, which helps them prepare for a job either in government or private sector.

Entri, part of Boston-based EdTech accelerator LearnLaunch, started off by providing content in Malayalam, and recently launched study materials in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Hindi, Hisamuddin said. It first started by providing a database of questions for government recruitment examinations in Malayalam.

Presently it provides over three lakh questions and over 1,000 videos in 5 different local languages, he noted. Entri has also started providing course content for upskilling spoken English, MS Office, etc that can help users get private jobs.

"Only 5 per cent of all the people in the world have English as their first language. But they have to depend on the english content on the internet to learn skills that matter to them", he added. According to Arjun Malhotra, Partner at Good Capital, "It's ridiculous that economic opportunities suffer a bottleneck in India because of the medium of learning.

Skills like Excel or project management shouldn't require people to be proficient in English". Over 10,000 users have been able to secure a job using the Entri app, he claimed.