Serial entrepreneur K Ganesh has sold rest of his stake in Tutorvista, the online tutoring company which he co-founded with his wife Meena Ganesh in 2005 to UK publishing house Pearsons, which is making a major push in the Indian education market.
TutorVista was backed by Sequoia Capital and LightSpeed Venture four years ago.
Pearson, which had a minority stake in TutorVista in 2009, upped its stake in the company to 80 % in 2011. The publishing giant, acquired the majority stake for Rs 577 cr, valuing TutorVista at Rs 1,000 crore at the time.
Srikanth B Iyer, the Chief Operating Officer of Pearson’s education wing is the new Chief Executive Officer of TutorVista.
The UK publisher has been pushing hard in the education market in India, in a bid to strengthen its growing business in the segment. Its planning to get to a 100 schools this year, the company said. Pearson had also launched bundled education tablets in India.
That elearning is a big opportunity in emerging markets is no secret. Rising middleclass and policies such as the right to eduction has put pressure on classroom learning. As physical classrooms become more and more crowded, online methods are likely to ease the pressure. Companies like Educomp and NIIT are leaders in providing technology enabled classroom solutions in India, working with hundreds of schools in the country.
According to estimates by Technopak, the current e-learning market in India is pegged at $150 mn, growing at 15 % cagr. TutorVista, Extramarks, Mathguru, Studyplaces, 100 percentile and iProf are some of the key players in the segment. TutorVista, also caters to the much larger US & UK markets.
The digitized school products market, in which Educomp and others are key players is estimated to be worth $500 mn in private schools and $750 mn in public schools. The private school market is likely to grow 20 % cagr to reach $ 2 bn by 2020 and the government school market is set to grow five times by 2020.
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