EduKart eyes overseas market; 10,000 courses by end of the year

Education marketplace EduKart, which offers a platform to help students choose and enrol from over 2,000 courses across categories, is looking at listing 10,000 courses on its platform by the end of this year, apart from eyeing opportunities overseas.

According to estimates, the education sector in India is a $60-billion market. “Since it is fragmented, a marketplace model like ours works well. Students can compare courses and choose according to their location, purchasing power, learning online or offline and even a combination of both,” CEO Ishan Gupta said.

Founded in 2011, the start-up offers courses ranging from degree programmes such as MBA, PGDM, MCA, MA, MCom, MSc, BBA, BCA, BA, BCom and BSc to industry certifications in digital marketing, IT, big data, finance, law to preparatory courses for IIT JEE, AIPMT, CAT, IAS entrance exams, etc.

Course providers

The course providers listed on the platform include players such as Jamboree, Vidyamandir, Aakash, NMIMS, Toppr, Brilliant Tutorials, Indian School of Business, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, and Digital Vidya, among others.

Going forward, the company plans to introduce a review and ratings system soon for courses listed on its platform. “To tackle the problem of fake/planted reviews, we will open this up only for students who have taken a course,” he said.

The start-up is also looking beyond the Indian market. “We are seeing traction in SAARC countries followed by Africa and West Asia. We also want to bring in foreign courses on our platform,” Gupta added.

Online learning

With the revolution in online learning, will the classroom model still continue to exist? “We will see a majority of the learning getting skewed towards the online medium in the next five-six years, but this doesn’t mean that the classroom model can be substituted,” Gupta maintained.

Funding rounds

EduKart raised its seed round of $500,000 from Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm), Sasha Mirchandani, Manish Kheterpal and Stanford alumni in 2011.

It further raised $500,000 in angel round from Kima Ventures, AKM Systems, Vibhor Mehra, Amit and Arihant Patni, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Manish Kheterpal and Stanford alumni in 2013.

The company raised another $1 million in 2015 from United Finsec, Yuvraj Singh's YouWeCan Ventures and early stage fund 500 Startups. Existing investors including Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Manish Kheterpal, Amit Patni and Arihant Patni, Stanford Business School’s alumni angels also participated in this round.