While most Indian Adtech startups work to expand their catalogs through live and recorded courses for students, some have begun to adopt different approaches to address the South Asian country’s larger education market. Teachmint, a one-year-old startup, is betting on empowering teachers to create their own virtual classrooms with a few taps on their smartphones.
The epidemic began during the epidemic, calling it a mobile-first, video-first technological infrastructure for teachers to class online, engage with students, assign tasks, manage attendance, and collect fees. In an interview with TechChart, Mihir Gupta, co-founder, and CEO of TeachMint, said that TeachMint’s offer has already attracted more than one million teachers from more than 5,000 cities in India and usage is growing by more than 100% every month.
Last month, students swallowed more than 25 million live classes at TeachMint, he said. Naturally, investors are also paying attention. On Thursday, the startup said it had raised $20 million in a new investment led by Learn Capital and with the participation of CM Ventures. The new investment, dubbed Pre-Series B, comes less than two months after the $16.5 million Series A fund was launched.
Apart from adopting separate approaches to tackling places of learning in India where more than 250 million students go to school, another key issue that sets Teachmint apart is its technical infrastructural skills. Most startups today rely on a number of technology vendors for video streaming, cloud storage and processing tasks and fee collection. “Zoom and Google Meet are great services for talking to people. However, they are not designed to meet the needs of teachers and students,” said Gupta.
Without relying on other technology providers, Teachmint, which considers better capital between Lightspeed India Partners and its investors, has been able to optimize its offer more aggressively, Gupta said. Through his proprietary approach, Teachmint said it is able to significantly control and improve interactivity in these classrooms. Having in-house technology offers helps to spend only a fraction for each class in the beginning.
“We have created a completely new department. Any teacher can download the TeachMint app and create their first classroom in minutes. The ease of this digitization of the classroom was not present before TeachMint,” he said, adding that more than 75% of teachers on the platform use their smartphones to conduct classes.
