Building A Bootstrapped Ed-Tech Venture

The founders of Edureka had a simple thought while setting up the company: Find the right teacher, and any course will automatically be effective.

- Poornima Kavlekar

Lovleen Bhatia and Kapil Tyagi, erstwhile employees at Infosys Technologies, found their calling in entrepreneurship after their journey in the professional world. Subsequent to their stint in Infosys Technologies, the duo moved on to work in other corporates. Eventually, Tyagi set up a mobile app company in Noida, which Bhatia joined. “While running the organization, we realized that people who were being recruited had no idea about what to do as their education had not trained them. Also, with technology changing so much, those who were in employment couldn’t scale up as quickly and were becoming irrelevant,” says Lovleen Bhatia. He and Tyagi realized that it was not a demand side problem but was more a supply side one and the duo wanted to do something to solve it and thus was born Edureka in 2012. The company was set up with an idea of getting industry practitioners on board its platform to teach the students. “We decided to get practitioners to teach since finding instructors on a full time basis was difficult largely due to poor remuneration,” explains Bhatia. He continues, “Not just this, learning from an Android or Big Data expert gives one a practical learning experience as compared to what one gets from a traditional institute where you realise that the people who are teaching you may not have worked on this and do not have the competency on the topic.” To get over the issue of time and compensation, the company decided to make it an online teaching platform.

Edureka was shaped up with the thought that if one had to improve education, they should get the right people to teach it and, hence, got high quality practitioners to teach part time.

Teachers, the key