Nearly a month after his exit from Housing.com, Advitiya Sharma has launched his next entrepreneurial venture, and this time it’s in education. The 26-year-old is boot-strapping his new venture, Genius, which will launch a slew of micro schools in the country to provide after-school education.

Genius will be officially launched on Thursday night, and is looking to employ about 500-800 teachers and coach nearly 8,000 students in the first three months. “We are trying to re-imagine education and focusing on kindergarten to standard VIII. This is the most important time in their lives as it’s the time when they learn the fundamentals,” Sharma told BusinessLine confirming the development.

“Problems are that schools’ education systems are not fundamentally right. They have a size that fits all,” Sharma said.

And this time, the stress is not on online and technology, but on the bigger picture of education.

“Technology has failed to revolutionise education across the world as it is a reactive tool. Education and learning needs to be pro-active.” A number of techies from Silicon Valley are joining Sharma in this venture. He, however, declined to name them as most are serving their notice periods.

Modus operandi

Genius, which already has a web presence, will work with entrepreneurial teachers who will run from their homes. These would be run under a franchise basis and would be very close to the students’ residence. The firm will provide content and text, which these teachers would teach using tablets and computers. It has already begun to invite entrepreneurial teachers through its website.

Genius intends to start operations from the top five cities — Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad. “We intend to further expand to other cities.”

In a move that surprised many in the industry, Sharma, who was among a group of 12 students from IIT-Bombay to start real estate portal Housing.com in June 2012, quit the company on March 15. Hailed as a trouble shooter, fire-fighter and a “level-headed person”, he quit at the time when the company had come out of all troubles.

Sharma had anchored the company at the time of crises such as co-founders exits, restructuring of businesses and job losses, among others. In an interview after his exit, he had told BusinessLine that his next “disruptive” venture could be either in finance, education or clean technology.

Churn at SoftBank- backed Housing.com continued even after Sharma’s exit. Earlier this month, four co-founders — Abhishek Anand, Ravish Naresh and Sanat Ghosh — quit the company to start a new venture.

The company, which is now being boot-strapped, will go in for fund raising at a later stage.

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