TutorVista.com, the consumer online education services company, has raised $18 million from PE player Sequoia Capital and LightSpeed Venture Partners to fund its expansion into a hybrid (online-offline) education model.
In addition, the company is in talks with strategic investors to raise another $15 million independently, for which it has filed an application with the FIPB. The two-and-a-half-year-old company acquired the Bangalore-based Edurite last November, and the current ramp up focuses on Edurite Tutorial, physical brick-n-mortar centers where students get scripted lessons through technology and teachers act as mere facilitators. Earlier, the company had planned to roll out several key initiatives like enhancing the Edurite product and services portfolio and also venture into new fields.
“So six months back, when we looked at opportunities in India, we decided that we cannot apply the global model here,” says K Ganesh, CEO and founder of TutorVista.com, a company operating from 23 Indian cities with over 800-plus teachers who sit at home and teach over 10,000 students worldwide, largely in the US.
India’s low internet penetration was a stumbling block and so TutorVista.com decided to follow the hybrid model. “The propensity of Indians to spend on education is one of the highest in the world,” says serial entrepreneur Ganesh. What Edurite got to the table was content and technology that reached the masses domestically with a presence in over 600 schools. Neraly half of the Kendriya Vidyalayas use Edurite content, for instance.”When we acquired Edurite, there were 120 people, and today after six months, there are 230 of them,” claims Ganesh.
The company plans to take its Edurite Tutorial brand forward by standardizing education across geographies. That is, the physical centers will offer the same tech-driven content to students from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Fifty such hybrid centers are already in place since its launch last month. “We’ll have 300 centres in the next one year,” adds Ganesh.
Though Ganesh’s acquisition calls for an online-offline amalgalm, globally, the online education industry is pegged at over $16 billion. Of this, the supplemental education, or assisted learning market, stands at a whopping $8 billion. With broadband penetration, voice over internet technology and lowering of PC prices, this market is poised to grow.
Source: Economic Times