Here's How This Edtech Has Opened Up A World Of Possibilities Teachmint is helping teachers by providing technology solutions for online classes

One industry that has benefitted maximum from COVID-19 is edtech. The newly launched edtech startups as well as the existing ones both have shown promising growth.

Some edtech startups are busily expanding their course offerings and video uploads to acquire more customers. At the same time, edtech Teachmint is helping teachers by providing technology solutions for online classes.

Bengaluru-based Teachmint, which began its life after the global pandemic broke last year, enables hundreds of thousands of teachers in the world's second-largest Internet market to run classes online and serve their students.

Let's have a look at Teachmint's short but promising journey.

Founded in 2020 with a base in Bengaluru, Teachmint is empowering teachers by providing them easy to use teaching app. The startup is mainly focused on "Mobile First, Video First" online solutions. With few taps, online tutors can create their own virtual classroom space.

The startup provides online classroom space, automated attendance, assigning tasks and follow-ups, and fee collection as some of the major features in a teacher's private virtual classroom.

The startup was founded by Mihir Gupta, Payoj Jain, Divyansh Bordia, and Anshuman Kumar. As per Teachmint, it got fourfold growth in its teaching business within 8 weeks of launching the Teachmint app.

In a discussion with Entrepreneur India, Teachmint co-founder and chief executive officer Mihir Gupta stated that they have around 1 million teachers on their platform. Currently, it has a presence in more than 5,000 cities and the startup is recording a 100 per cent growth every month. Around 25 million live classes were conducted in June 2021.

Today, the startup is the largest live teaching platform in the world (outside of China) with over a million teachers from more than 5,000 cities on its platform, powering 1 million live learning hours every day.

The company has completed four investment rounds to date, within roughly a year from its inception.

Due to the spike in Teachmint operations, investors are showing more interest to invest in a year-old startup. In a recently concluded round in July 2021, the edtech startup raised $20 million in a Pre-Series B round led by Learn Capital and CM Ventures. Earlier in the Series A round in May 2021, Teachmint collected $16.5 million led by Learn Capital and participation from CM Ventures, Lightspeed and Better Capital. Teachmint valuation recorded threefold growth due to above back-to-back funding rounds within two months.

Other edtech startups did not initiate the tech infrastructure operations due to the strong presence of Zoom and Google Meet. Teachmint believes that these platforms are good for meetings and different official conversations but they are lacking classroom-friendly features. Teachmint app simplicity is liked by online teachers and that is the reason over 90 per cent of online teaching and learning is taking place over a mobile device.

The app supports 11 Indian languages including English. Since the app doesn't offer any content for students, so the startup plans to go global with its operations in the coming year.

"We strongly believe that empowering teachers is critical to increasing the penetration of education, which is key to progress and development. And what teachers need is access to infrastructure that helps them digitize, break geographical barriers and significantly transform learning outcomes in their students. To solve for this, we have built our own proprietary classroom technology in the form of a teaching platform to give teachers a simple and intuitive way of teaching online without dealing with fragmented and complex digital tools," Gupta explained.

He believes that while there has been a boom in the edtech space in India over the last few years, there are very limited solutions designed to solve the fundamental infrastructure challenges that exist in online teaching. Teachmint is the only player catering to end-to-end infrastructure needs - from a teacher to even edtech players. Solutions like meeting apps are great for talking to people, but not as convenient to power teachers, schools and institutes to teach online. Most edtech startups today also rely on scores of technology vendors for streaming their videos, cloud storage and processing tasks. With Teachmint, they have created a new category within edtech that is focused on building the core infrastructure of online teaching itself.

"With Teachmint, we want to democratize online education across the world and we will be launching in global geographies soon. We went from 0 to 5 million users in a year since launching our platform. Now it's about scaling from our current base of 10 million users to 100 million users and beyond. For this, in addition to expanding our reach, we will also continue strengthening our proprietary video tech platform for independent teachers, schools, and colleges as well as edtech organizations," Gupta said while sharing his future plans for the company.