Avagmah - Bangalore Based Education Technology Startup Focuses on Higher Education
Avagmah was founded in December 2013 by Karthik K S, who is an edupreneur. Karthik is an NIT Kurukshetra alumnus and a serial entrepreneur too. Karthik is the founder & CEO of Avagmah. Prior to founding Avagmah, he co-founded 24×7 Learning, Indian eLearning consulting, technology and implementation company. He also runs an NGO that helps educate and enroll underprivileged children into formal education. Karthik has over 23 years of industry experience and is deeply passionate about the education space.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Karthik K S, Founder & CEO, Avagmah and Spoke to Him
How does Avagmah works?
Avagmah provides state-of-the-art intuitive Avagmah Technology Platform (ATP) to universities, which is an amalgamation of cloud-based SaaS technology. Avagmah’s technology platform is available on a managed services model, assisting universities with application-based and web technology solutions for delivery of courses. Avagmah offers end-to-end web and mobile app platforms, helping universities manage marketing, student counselling, virtual classroom, student engagement and retention.
Genesis
In the last 2 decades India Inc marched ahead to work with the world’s best, however, the education system in India did not keep pace to produce top quality manpower resources in large numbers. Millions of students joined the workforce but are hitting the glass ceiling for want of apt knowledge and competence. In the developed world working professionals take an academic sabbatical a few years into their working life, however in India because of various reasons at their personal front this is not an option. Distance education was also not an option because of both distance and poor quality.
With millions of working professionals aspiring to compete with their global counterparts, Avagmah was started to meet this opportunity by helping good universities in reaching quality contemporary education via technology and internet.
Differentiation Factors
Avagmah emulates a successful model in the US, leading amongst them being academicpartnerships.com. The only difference is we are operating in a much larger market with costs being dismally low.
In India there are many companies offering short courses catering to immediate enhancement in skills. Avagmah helps the pent up demand of quality education amongst working professionals by helping existing universities use technology to reach out to them. The pent up hunger to complete a graduation or post graduation is what Avagmah meets.
Funding status
Avagmah recently received funding from Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder and former CEO & MD of Infosys and Atul Nishar, founder of Hexaware and Aptech Computer Education for an undisclosed amount. In the last 18months, Avagmah has raised $5 million in investment. Our existing investors also participated in the current round of funding. They include Singapore based Lionrock Capital, serial entrepreneur and investor K Ganesh, founder and former CEO of TutorVista and Neeraj Bhargava, founder and CEO of Mumbai-based investment firm Zodius Capital.
Monetization
Avagmah Technology Platform operates on a per user basis.
Challenges
When we were starting up, there were two initiating points for us - technology as well as the client which are the Universities. When we started, the technology was not ready to sign up a University and Universities were wanting to see how the Technology works before signing in. Avagmah, however, was not wanting to have a gap between the launch date of the platform and getting a University. Thankfully within 1 year of starting both happened simultaneously.
Traction details
In the last 18 months, we have enrolled 3,651 students. Through our platform, Avagmah offers MBA, BBA courses and other post-graduate degrees like those in finance and human resources. About 45% of those enrolled on the Avagmah platform are from tier 2 & 3 cities.
Market size and market opportunity
The global market size of online education is estimated to reach $220 billion by 2017. In India, online education is currently a $20 billion industry and is poised to double its size by 2017.
The enrolment ratio for higher education in India is presently 24% and the government has set an ambitious target of it to grow 30% by 2020, which practically means setting up of 1,400 colleges to meet the requirement, which is near impossible. Thus, this opens up a huge market for online education in the coming years.
