Genext Students aims for 80K ‘Tutorpreneurs’ by 2020

'Genext Students'- India’s first Hybrid Tutoring Platform is right here! 

"If the poor boy cannot come to education, education must go to him'' - Swami Vivekananda. Thanks to these brilliant minds, education startups in India are evolving each and every day. The new India has realized that there is untapped potential in education segments and knowledge is by far the best treasure we could cultivate among young minds.

In sync with the idea of innovation in education and learning, Ali Asgar Kagzi has co-founded Genext Students, along with his cousin Asad Daud, both graduates of London School of Economics (LSE). This one-of-its-kind platform brings quality home tutors along with proprietary content (online & offline) to the doorstep of needy parents/students using technology as a key driver.

Genext Students claims to be India's first Hybrid Tutoring Platform, combining the best of private tutoring with technology enabled learning for CBSE, ICSE & State Boards. It enables personalized learning for students and provides real-time progress updates to parents. On the other hand, it empowers educators & tutors to become entrepreneurs, and in turn, leading to creation of a wave of ‘TUTORPRENEURS’ across the country.

Read on to know more about Kagzi’s venture as he narrates his journey with Baishali Mukherjee.

The magic of technology

While at LSE, I was fascinated while using technology as an enabler of education - accessing online study material, taking online assessments and watching online videos. This was a stark contrast to the reeling educational infrastructure in India which was, and is still, plagued by two major obstacles: lack of quality physical infrastructure (schools, colleges & educational institutions) and lack of skilled resources (teachers & educators). The vision of the wonders that technology could bring about in the education ecosystem of India mesmerized me. This was how the seed of leveraging technology to create disruption in Indian education space was sown in my mind.

Ali Asgar Kagzi

After my Masters at LSE, I went on to join Accenture as a Consultant in their London office. However, the idea of an ed-tech venture kept growing stronger and after a short, yet highly valuable stint at Accenture, I moved to India to launch Genext Students with my cousin and co-founder Asad Daud in February 2013.

Evolving the business model

Focusing on school-level students, Genext Students was initially a pure content delivery platform for students of CBSE and ICSE boards. Subsequently content for state boards like Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Maharashtra was added on the platform. With its offering of Hindi content for Rajasthan and UP boards, Genext Students is also the first ed-tech company to have launched content for Hindi medium students. However, the platform couldn’t deliver the expected impact on the mass level. Rigorous work on-ground and detailed research by our team showed that digital content alone wasn’t sufficient to deliver the required outcome and that a tutor was an essential component of the entire ecosystem.

Majority of the ed-tech platforms had been trying to eliminate the tutor instead of empowering them. With this lesson well learnt, the business model was evolved. From being a simple online content delivery platform we tried to get metamorphosed into India’s first Hybrid Tutoring platform by early 2016.

One-stop solution

Ours is a high impact platform that closely ties in all the three stakeholders of the education system – students, parents, and tutors in an unprecedented way. It ideally bridges the existing discovery, connection and delivery gap in the K-12 education system. It facilitates the parents to find and connect with best home tutors in their vicinity easily and, in turn, offers enhanced and personalized learning outcomes for the students.

Moreover, Genext Students has been empowering the passionate educators to become ‘TUTORPRENEURS’. It enables the tutors to focus on delivering quality education with the help of online and offline content and a suite of technology tools. This takes away the marketing, branding, assessment, and administrative hassles from the tutors so that they could focus on what they do best – i.e. teaching and educating. And, all this, while making a respectable earning for themselves!

Recognition and strategic partnership

The impact that Genext Students has created in India’s education space in a rather short span has been well recognized. It has been awarded as a winner of RED HERRING TOP 100 ASIA COMPANIES award (2016) and has been listed among TOP 40 EDU-TECH start-ups in Asia Pacific (2015). Over the years, it has successfully created strategic partnerships with renowned companies such as Samsung, Intel, IBM, Vodafone-Idea, Airtel, PVR, etc.

The road map

Presently we are catering to students of classes K-12 of CBSE, ICSE, (National Boards) and State Boards like Maharashtra, UP and Rajasthan, and are operating with 4,000+ TUTORPRENEURS primarily in Mumbai and Pune and has facilitated 20,000+ tutoring sessions through our platform over the last one year.

In addition, we have one million+ digital content users across India and the Middle East. Our target is to have 80,000+ TUTORPRENEURS onboard providing 10 million tutoring sessions by 2020. Eventually, we want to create a state-of-the-art education ecosystem which positively impacts the lives of all the three stake holders – students, parents and tutors.

Do you think a digitized hybrid tutoring space could transform the education system in the country? Do share your views.