SkillKindle
Founder: Tanuj Choudhary
Business model: Online marketplace to list, teach or learn a skill.
“Our dream is to create a strong platform for trainers to promote and leverage their skills and learners to discover and ace new skills. While 60 to 70 per cent of the skills market is handled by professionals, the rest 30 per cent, which amounts to a Rs. 15,000 crore fragmented market is what we are looking to harness.”
Headrush Insights
Founder: Hiren Gaglani
Business Model: Corporate management skill training by bringing in the best of professionalism, quality, creativity and logistics, through adventure sports.
“We combine the left brain logic and right brain creativity to create an experiential learning environment for the corporate employees. It being a commoditised market, the main challenge we face is, most companies don’t realise the value of experiential learning and thus, don’t allocate adequate budget to participate in or implement such activities.”
Sideways Training
Founder: Sunil Vishnu K, Karthik Kumar and TM Karthik
Business Model: Adopting art-based methodologies, such as music, dance and cooking, to deliver management training such as leadership skills, team-work and strategy development.
“For us, it is not just about making money. We believe that an art form of imparting training and education will transform the way employees learn and apply their lessons in everyday life.”
EnglishHelper
Founder: Sanjay Gupta
Business model: Imparting English language education through online, technology based learning, for schools, higher education students, skill building organizations and companies.
“In the early stages, the objective is to enable people to learn to read and eventually to read to learn. The depth of curriculum and method of language learning varies as the level goes up from a school student to a corporate employee.”
Jed-i
Founders: Dr. Swami Manohar and Dr. V. Vinay
Business Model: Bridging the skill gap between industry and engineering graduates through gifted engineers programs for first year students.
“In this space, the opportunity is vast and the demand is large. However, the conversion of this opportunity into revenue generating business is a continuing challenge. There is considerable pressure from industry for the quality of engineering graduates to improve and this pressure is expected to make the demand for Jed-i’s offerings progressively higher.”
Money Wizards
Founders: Dr. Swami Manohar and Dr. V. Vinay
Business Model: Bridging the skill gap between industry and engineering graduates through gifted engineers programs for first year students.
“In this space, the opportunity is vast and the demand is large. However, the conversion of this opportunity into revenue generating business is a continuing challenge. There is considerable pressure from industry for the quality of engineering graduates to improve and this pressure is expected to make the demand for Jed-i’s offerings progressively higher.”
Money Wizards
Founders: Venkatesh Varadachari and Thillai Rajan A.
Business model: Imparting financial education for learners to be on their own, investment and money wise.
“The financial education space is very exciting and in our opinion, is in early stages in the country. We have got solid demand from schools to college students to working adults to corporates. Our initial customers fall under the early adopter category. Going forward, as financial literacy goes mainstream, we see mass demand for our courses.”
Examify
Founders: Samudra Neelam Bhuyan and Angad Nadkarni
Business model: An online service which uses algorithms and crowd sourcing to generate intelligence around various examination topics and questions.
“Books cannot compete with a live product like ours because, on an online platform, products change every day. We are a live breathing community of people that are improving in terms of the quality of people and in terms of content. In terms of adoption, it will take time.”
Un-classroom
Founders: Shrikrishna Shrin and Souvik Roy
Business model: Bridging the gap between industry requirements and student skills, by offering project based courses to master an IT/ programming ability.
“Un-classroom believes in learning by doing. The best accreditation that students gain from our courses is showcasing what they have done and what they can talk about it. From a need perspective, the demand is there but it is an incredibly hard space to operate in. We haven’t seen many success stories come out of this space and the reason is not the lack of quality content, but the lack of willingness by corporates or universities to fund such skill development.”
Harness Handitouch Pvt Ltd
Founders: Subramanian Viswanathan
Business model: Leveraging on the tablet revolution to create interactive classroom learning through the power of human and digital connect, for school and management students and corporate employees.
“While Rs. 13.5 million seems to be a huge market potential, we are still facing budgetary challenges. Especially in schools, investing Rs. 30, 000 per tablet, per student still seems to be an expensive proposition.”
Hey Science!
Founders: Nirmala Sankaran and Harsh Rajan
Business model: ‘To dispel the fear of science’, an animated and interactive learning centre, designed with the support of Cambridge University.
“We want to stay focused on building global leadership in science education as it is constantly looking at the latest research coming out of the 21st century learning behaviour and infusing that in the way it creates lessons, games or stories.”
