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India’s largest online edu-tech start-up platform for competitive and entrance examination preparations, SuperProfs.com, is now casting its net wide this year to video-teach students sitting for international examinations like Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS), among others, for admission to overseas educational institutions.
Currently, SuperProfs, a teacher-aggregator having about 1.05 lakh students on its rolls and 200 of India’s “best professors”, offers online teaching for candidates taking examinations like CA, CMA, CS, GATE, IIT-JEE, banking, UPSC, NCFM and Actuarial Science.
Funds raised“In view of our huge potential, we were able to raise $3 million (₹19.5 crore) in two rounds of funding in December 2014 from Kalan Capital and IDG Ventures,” Piyush Agarwal, Founder, SuperProfs.com, told BusinessLine .
About his business model, Agarwal said SuperProfs, on an average, charges ₹3,000 to ₹4,000 per month per student sitting in any of these examinations for teaching various subjects through cloud-based video-lectures.
The company shares 40-50% of these fees with the professors concerned. “Besides, we also organise live webinars at specified dates for interaction between students and teachers to sort out queries and solve problems. We have developed technology to record their lectures, either in class rooms or in studios. These videos we share with the students enrolled on our cloud-based online educational platform.”
These live and recorded classes are accessible multiple times, 24x7, so that they could prepare for their exams anywhere, anytime with flexibility in studies. Agrawal said this has been made possible by SuperProfs’ proprietary technology which allows HD quality video streaming at extremely low bandwidths.
This means students can watch the classes even at as low as 100 Kbps network speed (typical 2G connection). SuperProfs has now brought the same disruptive technology to a native mobile app for best viewing experience. Students can attend HD-quality classes at their own convenience without having dedicated high-speed internet connectivity. Thus, classes offered work on very low internet speeds apart from being playable on most mobile devices. In doing so, the students save a lot of time, energy and money. These videos are downloadable on SuperProfs’ Android mobile applications.
A native of Bhopal, Piyush Agarwal studied computer engineering at IIT-Kanpur and Stanford University, from where he dropped out of the graduate programme in 2010. He learnt cutting-edge technology, laid a network, AURUS, to make quality education accessible to masses at affordable prices.
Soon, AURUS saw plenty of takers for low-cost online education, including the IITs and other leading engineering colleges. This led him to launch SuperProfs.com.
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