Impartus Innovations, a two years old Ed-Tech startup is using innovative video technology targeting tier-1 and tier-2 colleges and universities for a technically enhanced education process. Their flagship product ‘Lecture Capture’ records, edits and improvises classroom lectures with additional interactive tools and streams them live as well as make them available for future uses by students and teachers. The videos are encrypted and thus have high security and various interactive features for on-the-go improvisations by both teachers and students enabling enriched outside classroom learning experience.
Among its clientele are names like IIM-Bangalore, Shiv Nadar School, Gurgaon; Anna University, Chennai; Great Lakes Institute of Management and Manipal are clients of Impartus. The company has offices in Bangalore, Gurgaon, Kuala Lumpur and San Francisco and is eying a rapid adoption among India's thousands of colleges/institutes. The company raised Series A funding by Kaizen Private Equity in early 2015.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Amit Mahensaria, Co-founder of Impartus Innovations And Spoke To Him
How was Impartus Innovations started?
During our university days at IIT, we observed that not all students were able to stay up-to-date with classroom teaching. When we got together to discuss the issue, we realized that students across all schools or colleges often had difficulty getting hold of proper notes to study from prior to examinations. Most found it a challenge to keep up with the material introduced in classroom lectures.
All students in a classroom do not have the same abilities to comprehend via the standard lecture format, and yet each student must be provided with an equal opportunity to learn. The challenge was, how we could help students who were bright and motivated, but needed more of a blended learning approach in order to grasp the content? Outside of classroom, the learning was limited to only photocopied notes and books, which was a big handicap.
In December 2013, in an effort to create a classroom experience that could work outside the class as well, Manish, Alok and I co-founded Impartus Innovations, a video-based tech startup for higher education that records regular classroom lectures and converts it into digital (video) content for users to access it later and learn from it at their own pace.
Founding teamImpartus was co-founded by Manish Kumar, Alok Choudhary and I.
Manish is an IIT Delhi alumnus and comes with more than 12 years of industry experience, and is widely regarded as a technology maverick. Prior to co-founding Impartus, Manish worked with Citigroup as a technology professional in various capacities and developed some unique approaches in software solutions.
Alok has spent more than 12 years in the technology domain and has been designing everything from circuits to chips to algorithms to software. He started his career at Redpine Signals, a US based Fabless Wireless Semiconductor design firm where he co-developed a proprietary multithreaded processor, high efficiency power amplifier. For the past four years Alok has been closely involved in video platform technology. He is an IIT Madras alumnus.
I am an IIT Delhi and IIM Lucknow alumnus. Most of my previous work experience of more than a decade has been with the finance and education sector. Before co-founding Impartus, I worked as an Investment Manager at IDFC Private Equity, financing and managing various infrastructure sector and education sector investments. I am passionate about technology innovations and am a frequent participant at various technology and education industry events
Startup DescriptionImpartus provides cutting-edge video based learning solutions which drive better outcomes for the education sector. Our flagship product is a video-based learning platform that enables educational institutions to capture, edit, and distribute content. Educators are able to extend learning experiences outside of the classroom and provide relevant content to students worldwide.
Unique key feature/servicesImpartus is helping to transform higher education worldwide to enable students, teachers, and schools to achieve their full potential. The company’s flagship product is an interactive video learning solution that enables academic institutions to capture and distribute classroom lectures and other content automatically, either as live-streamed events or saved online for later review.
The Impartus platform also includes innovative tools which enable students, professors, and other participants to interact, collaborate, and learn together. Professors and students can share video notes, snippets, add additional information and links to contextual information. The platform enables students to watch lectures on-demand, anytime, anywhere, and enables educational institutions to connect classrooms on different campuses via live streaming. All video and educational content is encrypted and available only to the students of registered institutions.
The high level of interactivity enables teachers and students contribute to the videos and prepare and share video notes, snippets, adding additional information and links.
How is it different from existing ones?There is no one else out there that is doing exactly what Impartus does in the markets that we serve. Most of our competitors offer a piecemeal solution that only addresses specific points in our platform.
One key differentiator is that Impartus includes multiple interactive features designed to foster collaboration and deeper learning, and is accessible anytime, from any type of computing device.
Another is that Impartus’ blended learning approach incorporates best practices from e-learning and face-to-face classroom teaching to personalize content for students. We offer the most advanced technology, with specific expertise in video delivery and advanced analytics to back up our results. Some of our competitors offer lecture capture, but don’t provide any way to measure how effective it is.
Impartus offers its solution at a very competitive price point, without sacrificing anything in terms of high quality and best-in-class customer support. We are also working on global innovations in video search and video analytics.
Challenges facedThe biggest challenge we face as an enabler in the educational ecosystem is the willingness from institutions and educators to adopt new technology and use it to teach a bit differently than they have for hundreds of years. In some academic institutions, professors are reluctant to embrace video, so we need to help them to understand the value they can derive from it.
There are other roadblocks like dealing with multiple hierarchies within colleges and institutions to facilitate the decision making process. In some cases, university IT administrators are concerned that this may create an additional maintenance burden. To mitigate these concerns, Impartus provides a complete end-to-end solution, including hardware, software, and extensive customer service. We deliver the Impartus solution to customers via the cloud (SaaS) so that students, teachers, and other users can watch lectures and collaborate “anytime or anywhere” using the web-browser on their computers, laptops or mobile devices. Administrators see fast time-to-benefit as users can access new features right away. Finally, the platform integrates easily with existing learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, Sakai, and D2L to enable synergies across educational assets.
The Impartus solution is particularly well-suited to the Indian market and other emerging markets, where customers are looking for fast time-to-benefit, low cost, security, reliability, and high-touch support.
Funding statusImpartus has raised a Series A funding of $4.1 million from Kaizen Private Equity in late 2014.
Monetization modelWe derive most of our revenues from B2B sales, both directly through an in-house sales team as well as through channel partners. Our primary target segments are higher education institutions (colleges and universities), K-12, and corporates (corporate training).
Traction detailsWe are glad to have partnered with 70+ prominent names in the higher education sector of India. Some of our key clients are - Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B), Shiv Nadar School, PES University Bangalore, IFIM Business School Bangalore, Anna University Chennai, Symbiosis Institute of Business Management Pune, IIIT Bangalore.
We are catering to 2000+ faculty users, and 35,000+ students, across 600+ classrooms, and have recorded 200,000+ hours of classroom lectures.
Impartus Innovations has recently entered into a partnership with Xerox Research Certre India (XRCI) to carry forward its legacy of innovations in the field of education. By leveraging Xerox’s innovative technology, we aim to offer better video searchability as well as tailored content to every student and make learning more personalised for them.
Impartus is operational on a pan-India basis with offices in Bangalore (headquarter) and Gurgaon, along with offices in Kenya, Malaysia and USA for tapping a global market, with good inroads into the Asia Pacific market.
Market size & opportunityThere are more than 35,000 higher education institutes in India currently and this number is growing by 10-15% YoY. Currently we are focused on the top 10% of these institutions, which will lead to a rough market size of INR 2000 crores p.a. There's an equally big, if not bigger opportunity in K-12 segment as well as a much bigger opportunity in the Asia Pacific market outside India that Impartus is targeting.
Future PlansOver the next few years, Impartus aims to serve all types of academic institutions, including higher-education, K-12, and other organizations such as distance-learning academies. We will also serve corporate enterprises that seek to provide personalized and cost-efficient employee training. We have already achieved market leadership in India and a strong presence in other developing countries including Malaysia and Kenya. In India alone, we currently have potential customer base of 500+ universities, and an existing reach to over 200,000 students, growing by 10-15 percent annually, which makes our potential market considerably huge. Impartus also has a strategic vision to expand internationally starting with Asia Pacific market and gradually become a global leader in its space.
We are currently focusing on three key areas of development:
Student learning. Enabling better outcomes for students via enhanced learning, flipped classrooms, and an expansive array of relevant content from a shared library.
Connecting classrooms. Enabling schools to leverage “star” teachers and reduce costs by live-streaming lectures and events across classrooms, campuses, and countries.
Teacher improvement. Enabling teachers to receive better instructional feedback and improve their teaching skills.
We are also planning to bring in more advanced features into our existing platform. We recently announced partnership with Xerox Research Centre India that will enable deep video search and automatic generation of multi-modal table of contents in videos to make it easier for students and teachers to access desired section of the video. We are also looking forward to introducing gamification in the videos as well as increased collaboration and discussion among users on our platform to promote both peer to peer learning as well as community learning.
