India’s second-largest online tutoring platform Vedantu Innovations Pvt. Ltd, which turned unicorn last year, on Thursday announced roll out of an immersive live learning platform to differentiate itself from a clutch of edtech startups that have crowded the country’s 300 million K-12 (kindergarten to class 12) space.
The whiteboard audio visual 2.0 or W.A.V.E 2.0 is a patented technology that the company claimed will make quality education accessible to all children.
Vedantu further claimed that the technology leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to measure over 100 parameters to drive student engagement, teaching effectiveness, and learning outcomes.
Vedantu had first launched its proprietary live teaching platform W.A.V.E in 2018.
With W.A.V.E 2.0, the company aims to deliver insights through face recognition, content, whiteboard usage analysis, verbal interaction analysis, doubt analysis, tone, and sentiment analysis, among other features, it said.
The company, however, did not disclose the investment amount for tech platform launch.
“We were the first ones to start live tutoring back in 2014, and then others followed suit,” said Vamsi Krishna, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Vedantu.
“Everyone else has now started doing live now, so, how do how do we come out and say that everyone can do live, but this is what a 10X better live session looks like, and so it's always been our DNA to innovate, and we constantly challenge the status quo and so this is obviously an attempt in the direction,” Krishna told VCCircle in an exclusive interaction.
Vedantu said W.A.V.E has 5 patents filed, and 1 patent already granted in the US.
The company said W.A.V.E 2.0 encapsulates 67 live interactive features that enable students to interact and improve their learning outcomes.
It claimed that W.A.V.E 2.0 uses 40% less bandwidth than other platforms.
“Since its inception, W.A.V.E has been used by more than 4,000 teachers to teach 24 million students for 70 million hours. And these students came from over 7,300+ cities and towns, that’s almost 92% of the total cities and towns in India,” said Krishna.
“With W.A.V.E 2.0., we want to create a learning experience that sparks curiosity and makes a student more immersed in the entire learning process,” Krishna added.
Co-founded by Krishna, Anand Prakash, Saurabh Saxena and Pulkit Jain in 2011, Vedantu claims to have around 36 million monthly users through its app and web.
The company said in the last year alone, 280 million students visited Vedantu, and its YouTube channels witnessed 500 million views.
The company also recently launched operations in the Middle East. VCCircle had recently reported quoting Krishna that that Vedantu was looking foray into global markets as the company was gearing up for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2023-24.
Krishna had also said that the company would aim to achieve operational profitability before it goes public.
Vedantu’s launch of W.A.V.E 2.0. comes at a time when edtech startups in India are launching various proprietary products to differentiate themselves amid rising competition among one of the world’s biggest education markets.
Earlier this month, edtech unicorn Unacademy, operated by Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd, launched an offline experience store, where the startup said it planned to market its courses. In February, Byju’s, the world’s most-valued edtech startup, operated by Think & Learn Pvt Ltd, had launched offline tuition classes with an investment of $200 million. Byju’s’ aim was to start hybrid tuition classes in a post-Covid world, and was witnessing strong demand for the model, the company’s Chief Operating Officer Mrinal Mohit had told VCCircle.
However, some companies in the edtech space have struggled due to the rising competition. Lido Learning, an edtech platform for Class 5 to Class 12 students, operated by Quality Tutorials Pvt Ltd, had asked over 1,200 employees to tender their resignations in February, VCCircle had reported, as the company was in a financial crisis. Unacademy, too, fired over 100 employees from its PrepLadder team earlier this month, and then reportedly laid off over 200 educators.