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A WhatsApp-like mobile platform called Flinnt, which allows teachers to create groups with students and share academic resources like chapters, videos, data, charts among others, is making learning resource rich, easy and interesting for school children.

Academic institutions Developed by a group of entrepreneurs from Ahmedabad in June 2012, Flinnt is currently being used by about 105 academic institutions across Gujarat and a few in Mumbai, Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Tirupati.

“This will act as a communication platform between students and teacher. This is a platform that allows one/few to many broadcast. So, content broadcast can be monitored and managed. It is a good platform to share user-generated content like documents, videos of class-room teaching, best answer written by a student or graph or charts,” said Tarak Yagnik, one of the four founders and a marketing expert.

The Android-based mobile app is being used for students in the K-12 segment, graduate and post-graduate.

How it functions “Up to grade four, the teachers send one-way communications like reminders, announcements, homework, activity photos directly to the parent’s phone,” said Yagnik.

Once enrolled, the institute is given sign up codes, with which teachers and students can use the app.

Teachers post a document or a video on the platform, students can comment on it and discuss it further.

But unlike WhatsApp, the teachers can prevent mischief by restricting students from commenting on a particular topic. The platform can also operate on a desktop PC.

Currently, the company has total 40,000 users for the app.

“Our charges range from ₹5000 per annum to ₹15,000 per annum for different size of institutions. We are targeting the private institutions first as they can take faster decisions,” said Harish Iyer, Co-founder and CEO.

Breakeven this year The company, which has raised around $400,000 including an Angel round from US-based investors, expects to break even this year. Going forward, it is also planning to raise about ₹10-12 crore from venture funds.

Expansion plans In the next two-three years, the company plans to cover about 8,000-10,000 institutions across the country. By this year-end, the start-up plans to have a presence in 15 cities.

Because of its high dependence on customer acquisition to add new users, 70 per cent of the total cost goes towards it, while the remaining 30 per cent cost is for development and infrastructure.

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