An edtech startup in talks of acquisition. This sector has seen an amazing rise in the year 2021
Let us talk about the edtech sector and the acquisitions taking place in this sector. First of all, to define the edtech sector, it is education and technology. One of the major concerns, when the lockdown was imposed worldwide, was how will students manage their education? People had their doubts as to how technology will help in shaping the future of the students, but no one had an idea that this would turn out so well. The edtech industry helped almost 1.5 million schools and more than 250 million students across the country. The other doubt before implementing online education was whether the people of the country will be able to adopt this type of education?
And to an utter surprise and amazement of all, they easily and comfortably did. According to a report published, the search interest for online education in India has seen a 2 times growth. Even the investments of venture capitalists in the edtech sector have increased by 4 times and have reached USD 2.3 billion.
According to the expectations and the predictions made, the edtech industry of India will reach more than USD 3.5 billion by the end of the year 2022, which will be around five times its value in the year 2019, when it was USD 735 million. Talking about the global terms, the value of the edtech market is expected to reach USD 404 billion by the year 2025 from USD 227 billion in the year 2020. India is the second-largest edtech market in the world, with the US being on the top. India has more than 900 edtech startups, and out of these 900 startups, 750 have raised funding of a total of USD 8.5 billion.
Talking about the funding in this sector, the VC funding has also increased about ten times, from USD 245 million in the year 2016 to USD 2.3 billion in the year 2020.
Coming to the term acquisitions, it is defined as the process when one company buys more than half of the shares of the other company and thus gains control over the other company. By purchasing more than 50% shares of the targeted company, the acquirer company gets the decision-making power of the assets which are newly acquired, without the consent of the other shareholders of the company. Normally, we use the terms acquisitions and mergers interchangeably, but they have a slight difference between them.
Acquisition and takeover both mean buying more than half of the shares of the targeted company, but in the case of acquisition, both the companies participating are on good terms and are co-operative with each other. In the case of a takeover, on the other hand, the targeted company does not cooperate with the one that is buying and is opposing the purchase. Takeovers usually lead to hostile ones.
Announcement of the acquisition of the edtech startup
The edtech startup Teachmint is in talks to acquire Teachmore, as announced on December 13, 2021. The deal is in the final stage and is expected to close soon. This will be the first acquisition of Teachmint.
About Teachmint
Teachmint is a Bengaluru-based edtech startup that was founded in the year 2020 by Mihir Gupta, Divyansh Bordia, and Anshuman Kumar. The startup is on a mission to democratize online education. It is India’s largest online teaching platform and one of the fastest-growing edtech startups. The startup offers a mobile-first-video-first experience that enables teachers to create a digital persona of every classroom out there.
The startup took birth when millions of teachers and students were struggling to go online. Four friends came together and took an initiative to provide a seamless and exemplary experience for conducting live classes. The startup launched the application in just 21 days and grew rapidly crossing 1 million downloads in just 8 months.
The startup was started to address the big teaching-infrastructure gap in teaching and learning. The sole aim of the startup is to significantly increase teaching efficiency, reduce costs, and increase the student base for existing teachers. The startup is supporting new individuals to create teaching businesses from scratch across domains like K-12 tutoring, test prep, and extra-curricular learning.
The goal of the startup is to-
Ease– Making online teaching easy- The startup makes sure that its platform is easy to understand and that easy step is simple.
Trust– A platform that can be trusted- The startup strives to guarantee a trustworthy platform for both students and teachers alike.
Accessible– Focus on accessibility- The startup aims to democratize education and to make its platform accessible to everyone.
The investors of the startup are LearnCapital, LightSpeed, Goodwater Capital, Titan Capital, and many others.
About Teachmore
The startup, Teachmore was founded in the year 2017 by Deep Shah and Harsh BHakta. It is a course selling platform that allows teachers to build and sell educational products like online courses, live classes, quizzes, and more. The startup claims itself to be every teacher’s delight. It has no complex code and with just a few clicks, the android application will be ready to sell on Google Play and the website will be live.
The features offered by the startup are-
Create- Online Courses-
Create courses with a super-simple course builder.
Sell multiple courses at a bunch with Collections.
Mobile apps and websites
Native Fully-Featured Android and iOS mobile applications.
A beautiful high-converting website.
Superb learning experience.
Customize
Make changes to the application and website in minutes.
Create unlimited sales pages and any other pages if needed.
Make everything the way a customer likes.
Theme and branding
It is the application, logo, and colours of the customers.
The customers own it. The startup supports it.
Secure
DRM Encryption- Highly secure Hollywood-grade DR, encrypted video streaming
The customers own everything- The customers own all the data which is uploaded to Teachmore and all the user data and analytics related to it. All this is just for the user.
Market
Landing Pages
Code-free drag and drop landing pages. There are no complex codes which need to run, simple click and drop does the work.
The customers can use their convenient-optimized sales page template or create their own custom landing pages.
Easy and powerful, the customers will love it!
Emails
The customers(teachers) can send personalized emails to their learners
They can create groups based on user activities and attributes
Send target emails to their groups
Push Notifications
Get better conversion than email.
Re-arrange the students with in-app notifications
Posts
Build a rich community
Interacting with the learner through daily posts and comments
Send short videos, images, or text
Keep the learners engaged
Coupon codes
The startup incentivizes and gives benefits to enrollments by creating dollar-amount or percentage-off coupons with custom expiration times
Sell
Collect Payments
The platform allows the user to accept payments from more than 130 international currencies through Stripe Connect Credit Card processing or PayPal
It also allows to even accept multiple currencies for a single course
No transaction fees
The teachers who are the users can set their own prices
Users have their own getaway
Zero transaction fees
Boost revenue
Sell more with mobile applications
Talking in general about the acquisitions in the edtech industry, Byju’s, which is the most valuable edtech startup of the country has made 10 acquisitions in the year 2021 alone itself, and the latest one being GeoGebra of Austria. Unacademy which is led by Gaurav Munjal has also been in the headlines because of several acquisitions it made this year.
The edtech industry is doing great and we can just wait for the future to see what it has for this acquisition. Till then we can just wish both the startups good luck and a bright and successful future ahead.
