We at Vedantu believe that Edtech is a marathon, not a sprint: Nikhil Rungta

The Indian edtech sector – the second largest in the world – is expected to reach a market size of $10.4 billion by 2025. Vedantu is one of the best education platforms in India, known for creating one of the most sought-after learning apps. The pandemic also gave birth to many edutech companies, who are today reinventing themselves to meet customer expectations. The road ahead looks extremely exciting as the problem of quality education for the masses has still not been solved and the size of the opportunity is huge.

Today, the new generation of learners understands the expanding need to put new-age technology into practice. With its technology-driven model, targeting the new age market for personalised learning that is experiential to provide learning outcomes, Vedantu is redefining the standard of an online classroom and disrupting and creating 10x better teaching and learning experience for the students.

In conversation with Adgully, Nikhil Rungta, Chief Growth Officer, Vedantu, speaks about the Edtech company’s growth plans and why the road ahead for the overall Edtech industry is exciting. He further adds that there is clearly a huge opportunity for Edtech companies like Vedantu to excel and give a new shape to Indian education, which is on a growth path.

What has been the strategy of Vedantu post the pandemic? Where is the new growth likely to come?

At Vedantu, we keep going back to our mission – ‘To enable quality teaching for each and every child’; this keeps us energised and excited. Also, we have seen tough years and years of strong momentum, but what has stayed consistent is our undying passion towards our mission, no matter how long it takes because it is worth giving a lifetime to. We also learnt that building anything worthwhile takes time for the compounding to take its effect, it is important to just ‘Be in the game’ and run the marathon.

Over 80% of the students are in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and the biggest problem when it comes to quality education is access to quality teachers. We already get a lot of students coming from these cities and towns and we feel this demand is only going to grow.

Challenges faced by the Edtech industry? How do you plan to overcome some of the challenges?

Currently, the external environment is tough. War in Europe, impending recession fears, and Fed rate interest hikes have led to inflationary pressures with massive correction in stocks globally and in India as well. Given this environment, capital will be scarce for upcoming quarters. With COVID tailwinds receding, schools and offline models opening up, the hyper-growth of 10X that the Edtech companies experienced during the last two years will also get moderated. We understand that the market might not grow at the same pace, but given the opportunity, we still see 2-3 times growth in the coming years.

All Edtech companies will have to go back to first principles and focus on looking at the big picture around the huge market opportunity and the need gap of access to quality education. We at Vedantu believe that Edtech is a marathon, not a sprint and will continue to focus on two key fundamental strategies:

  • Continue to innovate for the students
  • Build a long term sustainable company with a resilient business model

You need to keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve. How is Vedantu bringing new ideas and concepts to drive more students to join online?

The education sector is not new to disruption. From the advent of MOOCs to the rise of home-schooling and online degree programs, the sector has seen a transformative technological innovation at least every few years. At Vedantu, while we continue to focus on our online business, the ‘hybrid model’ is one of the several initiatives being tested as a potential growth driver. Considering that the key objectives of Vedantu is making education accessible to students who are even in the remotest areas of the country, and create an impact at scale, the hybrid model presents an opportunity to combine the brand’s online capabilities, platform and teaching methodologies with an offline presence to deliver unique learning experiences and outcomes. 

What will be the focus of Vedantu for the next 3 years on the learning front? How do you plan to bring in differentiation in your product offerings?

Our core value at Vedantu has always been – Student First – we will continue to focus on the same. This means relentless endeavour to improve the learning experience, which leads to better learning outcomes for the students. This is driven by our top teachers and unique pedagogy that has been developed over the last 15 years with the inputs from our teachers, students and parents.

These are also our differentiators, as they are hard to copy or develop overnight. The proof of our offering is in the consistent good results that we have been helping our students get, whether it is top ranks in JEE and NEET or in Grade 10 and 12 Boards or even Olympiads across different grades.

How does the road ahead look like for Vedantu and the Edtech industry?

The road ahead looks extremely exciting, as the problem of quality education for the masses has still not been solved and the size of the opportunity is huge. With 300 million students in the K12 segment (that is, Kindergarten to Grade 12), out of these almost a third take on some or the other after-school tuition or coaching, and within that, the penetration of Edtech is less than 5%, which clearly shows the huge opportunity for Edtech companies like Vedantu.

What has been the engagement strategy with your audience and how have you kept the saliency of the brand high?

We constantly engage with our audience through content and our community initiatives. We believe education is a fundamental right and since our core mission is to create impact at scale, we provide a lot of useful content for free to our students, parents and teachers. This content ranges from high quality NCERT Solutions to Previous Years Papers of Board Exams to Mock Tests to Solutions to Popular Books to Revision notes.

We also have a strong community of parents and students across our social media platforms, where they constantly engage with us and also with each other.

Our biggest engagement platform is YouTube, where students get access to the best teachers and also get a chance to engage with them Live.

Apart from these, we also provide both in-class and after-class Doubt Solving, to help students get answers to all their questions.

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