Housing’s cofounder Advitiya Sharma has launched an education startup Genius on Thursday. He had quit Housing last month and had said that the whole startup ecosystem has drifted away from the fundamentals of building a product.
Advitiya’s Grandfather a Sahitya Academic winner and a teacher by profession inspired him to launch an education startup and solve a core problem of the ecosystem.
What Problem Will Genius Solve?
A number of education startups have sprung up in the recent past and have solved different problems but Genius plans to solve a fundamental problem of the education ecosystem and not just simply connect the students with online tutorials and teachers.
“Before launching the platform, I visited many schools and understood how rotten the system has become. With the same books over the years, schools are now producing average students who can be employable in the future. We are reimagining education system and aim to create an environment where learning is natural. With a customized technology, we will understand the learning pace of every child.”
Genius will follow a hybrid model of learning and technology. It will not only render strong technology to the students but also aims to inspire students to learn and bring pro-activeness in them. Differentiating the learning model, Advitiya explained that with a combination of content delivery given by the entrepreneurial teachers and problems to solve based on each topic, the platform will track a student’s grasping abilities and the algorithms will enable the teachers to guide the students based on their understanding.
According to Advitiya, many edu-tech startups have a very low completion course rate and does not provide a learning environment which he aims to solve with his new venture.
He believes that every child has his own strength and own pace of learning which needs to be understood to guide them better.
The startup has now started with Teachers registration and plans to open the parents’ registration in next two-three weeks. The sessions will begin from July.
The startup plans to register 500-800 teachers in next six months and reach 10-12,000 students across five metros. The platform will target students from kindergarten to Class VIII as that is the real learning phase for the students, says Advitiya.
Team
The startup will have a founding team of five members which will comprise of entrepreneurs, educationalists, teachers and a clutch of contributors from silicon valley.
Business Model
Advitiya plans to run the startup bootstrapped and concentrate on building a good product. The parents will be charged but he declined to disclose more details on this.
Competition
Though Genius is based on a different model which has been inspired by US based AltSchool, in India it will compete with Vedantu, Vidyanext, flipClass.
