The study app for students and teachers

GenextStudents was launched in 2013 as a basic platform providing study notes. Over a period of year, there has been amazing learning and the business has now evolved to its current state. It is one of the hybrid tutoring platform combining the best of physical tutoring and technology aided learning. This platform helps parents/students search and connect with the best tutor as per their requirements in their vicinity. And, this student – tutor connect is further enhanced by our technology aided tools. They also provide comprehensive digital content for adaptive learning. This content consists of study notes, solutions to text book question, sample question papers, past year board exam papers, video lessons and question & answer forum along with very comprehensive and chapter wise assessment modules. The performance analysis tool tracks and analyses the student’s study progress and their performance. There is a separate app for tutors as well. The tools take care of attendance, parent-teacher meet, tracking student progress etc.

Idea Framed, Fact behind

When a decision was made to foray into education space, the biggest challenge was where to start from? The larger the opportunities and the sector, the easier it is get overwhelmed and lose direction wanting to ensure that they address the existing problems at the grass root level and create a suitable solution rather than creating a solution and then fitting it into the existing system. Hence, research was made. It was noticed that, students, irrespective of their  income levels opted for after school tuition. A student also needs a tutor to guide and motivate him/her. Through their extensive ground work, research and interaction with parents, students and teachers they have figured that technology-only solutions would not be the best solution for Indian ecosystem – especially for kids at school level. Thus, they decided to focus on school level students and created a technology platform for helping out students with their studies and learning.

Founders and their Core team

The founders Ali Asgar Kagzi and Asad Daud are graduates in different streams from London School of Economics (LSE). And, it is during the course of their study at LSE they were exposed to the use of technology in education. Ali handles Overall operations, Product Development, Technology, Marketing & Sales. Asad handles Administration, Corporate Governance and Accounting & Finance. Realizing that there are several issues in Indian Education system and that those could only be solved with smart use of technology, the idea of GenextStudents.com took birth.

After 18 months of long struggle they formed a team of 12 people including the founders who are guided by 4 extremely experienced mentors. Having a unique combination of young, highly educated and passionate individuals who are mentored by the experienced mentors. Major chuck of the team is tech/prod development and the tech head is an IIT Bombay alumni.

Awards and Achievements

• Over the past couple of years, they have also formed strategic alliances with Samsung, Idea, Vodafone and Airtel. Also an Intel Premier partner and part of IBM’s Global Entrepreneurship Network.
• In the previous year, Genextstudents was nominated for Red Herring Top 100 Asia awards and was also listed among top 40 Ed-tech start ups in Asia Pacific region by Startup Daily (Australia) in 2015.
• The team has recently launched a hybrid model and in past 3 months they had 2000+ hours of tutoring and 500+ tutors on their platform. In addition, they had 600,000+ users for their digital content.
• Awarded by Rajasthan Government under Yuva Udyamita Protsahan Yojana in 2014.

Offers and Packages they provide

This bootstrapped start-up has valuable offerings and tools for parents, students as well as tutors. This helps in maintaining a bond with all the stake holders in education ecosystem which is a great challenge. At present, they cater to school students of classes 1-12 for CBSE, ICSE, SSC (Maharashtra), Rajasthan and UP Boards. The content for Rajasthan and UP Board is in Hindi, being the first ed-tech company to have structured content in Hindi language.

Dual Revenue Models

• Through Tutor connect – when a student connects with a tutor for tutoring services, the payment is made by the student on their platform. Then the tutor’s share is passed on to the tutor.
• Through subscribing to the digital content on web or mobile app, the entire package for a class is available for Rs. 3900 per annum. However, there are small offerings too starting from as low as Rs. 30.

Find, Connect and Learn

More to Come

As the home tutor connect services has been recently launched and is available only for Mumbaikars, they are planning to expand this to other cities and states for which already  content is available. They are also working to add study content for various other state boards in vernacular languages. In the next five years, the company aims to focus on scaling its business, add more tutors and students by reaching out to major cities across the country for partnership with tutorials.