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The co-founders of Classplus - Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal - met in 2007 in a coaching class for IIT preparation. They faced problems such as lack of content and adequate preparation material.
Chastened by their experience, the duo in 2015 started a startup called Classplus, previously known as XPrep, helping both tutors and students.
The platform allows tutors and institutions to manage their own classroom through a mobile app. It helps them to create their own learning apps by managing the attendance, parent-tutor communication, online tests, payment of fees and others.
The startup has also created a zero-typing product keeping in mind its usage by middle-aged tutors. It is now building a vertical for system intelligence to automate all the manual touch points of the current product.
The platform charges subscription fees, which starts from Rs 15,000 and can grow upto Rs 50,000, depending on the services required, according to Rustagi.
"Over the past 10 months we have been able to create a presence across more than 1000 tutors in the country which is more than 400-500 coaching institutes. This is across 12 different cities. It has also penetrated in smaller towns such as Amravati in Maharashtra, Rann of Kutch and others," said Rustagi.
As per the KPMG and Google 'Online education in India: 2021' report, the segment in India is expected to grow to $1.96 billion and the paid user base is expected to increase from 1.6 million to 9.6 million in 2021.
It also states that online primary and secondary supplemental education is expected to be the category of courses with a 39 percent market share in 2021.
While talking about the adoption of technology in the education industry, Rustagi said: "We have seen that almost every profession in this country whether it be from the cab drivers or the plumbers or any profession in some capacity or the other it has leveraged technology to actually grow the businesses.
"But if you look at technology in education that is not the case. In fact there have been premises that have been built that people probably don't need teachers and technology can teach kids on their own. We saw the gap and also believed that in this country you cannot remove teachers out of the system."
The company has raised $500,000 as seed funding from Netherlands-based VC firm Rising Stars, Manish Amin, founder of Yatra, Pallav Pandey, founder of Knowlarity and others.
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