Vamsi Krishna (34) is CEO and co-founder of the Bangalore-based Vedantu Innovations Pvt. Ltd (VIPL, estb. 2014), an edtech company which offers class VI-XII CISCE/CBSE students after-school supplementary learning solutions, including test preparation for admission into top-ranked engineering colleges.
On its patented software app which can be downloaded on any Android device, Vedantu tutors deliver course content mapped to CISCE/CBSE school curriculums using its customised in-house WAVE — whiteboard, audio and video environment — technology that enables live two-way interaction on very low bandwidths. Currently, the company has 460 maths, physics, chemistry and biology tutors on its rolls to instruct its 11,000-plus students.
Newspeg. In early April, VIPL introduced an innovative teacher assessment tool to evaluate the degree of teacher-pupil engagement during live teaching-learning sessions on parameters such as subject knowledge, voice modulation, quick response of queries, body language etc. “E score feedback gives our teachers data for continuous improvement,” says Krishna.
History. An alumnus of IIT-Mumbai, Krishna was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug during his early college years and together with three childhood friends Saurabh Saxena, Pulkit Jain and Anand Kishore (all IIT graduates), co-promoted the Lakshya Forum for Competitions Pvt. Ltd — a brick and mortar test prep centre — in Barnala, in the Sangrur district of Punjab by investing Rs.5 lakh raised from friends and family. Having started from a small town, Krishna is well aware that access is a huge challenge to delivering high-quality education in India. After six years of managing and gradually upscaling Lakshya, Krishna and his friends sold it to MT Educare (aka Mahesh Tutorials) and in 2014, Vedantu (Sanskrit for knowledge network) was promoted.
Tuition fees: Rs.80-900 hourly per teacher deployed.
Direct talk. “Vedantu is driven by a mission to find scalable solutions to the enormous education deficit in India, and the excitement of building innovative technology solutions. We believe the one-size-fits-for-all classroom model doesn’t work. Therefore, our objective is to create a vast resource pool of well-trained teachers to deliver high-quality education to student communities countrywide,” says Krishna.
Future plans. Krishna’s ambition is to spread the network of Vedantu tutors nationally. “This year we intend to saturate tier I and II cities and subsequently tier-III cities and rural India over the next five years. We are also currently working on tutoring students in more grades and subjects, beyond what we serve today,” he enthuses.
Odeal D’Souza (Bangalore)