Switch to distance education drives investment found in India's education technology sector

As academic institutions and universities in India were forced to close because of the coronavirus pandemic and with pupils embracing digital learning, Kopykitab,an electronic learning system, found its servers were being overwhelmed.

At times, there was so much unpredicted demand for his company's online education offerings over the past year that its system could not cope, the company's co-founder Sumeet Verma says.

“We had multiple instances of our cloud server receiving choked with traffic,” Mr Verma, who is also the principle executive of the Bangalore-based company which offers classes on the web and e-books, says. “That was an excellent problem to resolve.”

Backed by investors including the Michael and Susan Dell Base, Kopykitab has seen the monthly active users grow from 800,000 monthly prior to the pandemic to 2.8 million today.

“It takes a lot of time to change consumer behaviour but the pandemic amplified everything,” says Mr Verma. Ahead of that, India's education technology marketplace was “evolving”, he says. Corporations like his found themselves as “doing work for the future”.

India's EdTech sector is normally likely to grow in worth to $30 billion within the next 10 years from about $735 million to $800m in 2019, regarding to a written report published found in April by RBSA Advisers.

Along with the enhance from the pandemic, “the introduction of EdTech has coincided with developing internet penetration with option of cheaper smartphones and low data prices”, says Rajeev Shah, controlling director and chief executive of RBSA Advisers.

This is increasing usage of online education in a country which has one of the largest education systems on earth, with a population of 430 million between your ages of six and 23. During the past year, more start-ups possess entered the market to offer much-needed digital lessons through the pandemic.

Not surprisingly, the EdTech sector in India continues to be nascent when compared to likes of the United States and China, meaning generally there continues to be enormous scope for expansion. Investors have already been keen to can get on board.

“Indian EdTech has been on shareholders' radars for quite some time right now,” says Devendra Agrawal, founder and chief executive of Dexter Capital Advisers.

“2020 was a good year to improve capital for EdTech”, he adds, explaining that the sector found a lot more than 50 start-ups raise $1.9bn, that was three times the total amount secured in the last year.

“The investor interest is due to India’s obsession with top grades, admission to top colleges and landing profitable jobs,” says Mr Agrawal.

This has driven the growth of Byju's, which is by far the largest player in the space and considered a pioneer in the sector. The tutoring app for schoolchildren was founded in Bangalore by 2011 by Byju Raveendran, who himself worked as a tutor and whose father and mother were teachers. Bloomberg reported previous month that fresh money being elevated from UBS Group would help to make it India's most valuable start-up, with a valuation around $16.5bn.

Byju's recently raised $1bn from traders including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's B Capital Group, according to Bloomberg, due to the business continues to expand and offers been making acquisitions in the sector.