Ed-Tech in India

There was a small Twitter thread that I had written a while back about the Ed-Tech sector in India, here I am converting it into a blog post.

The below conversation between Shruti Rajagopalan and Sajith Pai was interesting and the Indus Valley Report is always insightful. A few comments follow -

In the section “Different Kinds of Startups” there was one type of startup that was missed — startups that are filling in the gap left due to very bad policy-making — I mean companies like BYJUs and Physics Wallah which exist because our education system is broken.

These companies are considered ed-Tech but I think the more accurate term would be exam-Tech. When someone says ed-tech the names that come to my mind are companies like Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy.

The Indian ed-tech companies are more like exam-tech companies because their main target customer is people preparing for exams, not students or working professionals looking to acquire new knowledge and skills.

These exam-tech companies are even opening their own physical spaces in towns well known for being exam factories like Kota, Rajasthan. The fact that such companies are getting much traction and have become unicorns is a red flag that our education system is screwed up.

If the education sector gets liberalized then the need for such exam-Tech companies will cease to exist. I had tweeted about it previously here -

World-over there are a lot of deep-tech startups that are becoming unicorns, like — Databricks, ByteDance, OpenAI, HuggingFace, etc… The companies next in line to becoming a unicorn are companies like — Pinecone, Anyscale, OctoML, MosaicML, Voltron Data, etc…

These unicorns are really innovating and furthering our tech capabilities in areas such as data analytics, compiler technology, vector search, distributed computing, AI, and Machine Learning.

But in India, many tech startups that are becoming unicorns are either e-commerce/logistics companies( like Swiggy, Blinkit, Zomato, etc…) or so-called ed-tech( exam-tech) companies. We have very few deep tech unicorns(despite the new “build in India and sell to the world” SaaS companies).

I think this is worth mentioning in the Indus Valley Report — that there are companies, that exist and are becoming unicorns because of bad economic policies, which is why I think many unicorns might not end up making money for their investors.