Aditi Avasthi’s Embibe Combines AI and Education in a Revolutionary Way

Published on 10 Nov 2018

Dream big, focus on your mission, and anything is possible. That’s what Aditi Avasthi and Embibe have taught me over the four years that we’ve worked together. As a student, Avasthi missed out on a place at IIT by a few points. That gave her the impetus to set up Embibe, an online test prep tool in 2012, with a singular mission—to create massive impact across every age group and socio-economic strata.

The former TCS employee started by attacking the hardest sector—engineering and medical entrance exams. To improve outcomes, we first had to decode the relationship between thousands of concepts from grade one to twelve. To build this knowledge tree, we had to hire some of the brightest data scientists in India. We moved the company from Mumbai to Bengaluru.

Avasthi was willing to risk everything to build the knowledge tree, the education version of the human genome. Soon, we saw material improvements in performance on the most difficult exams, which enabled us to help students from tribal schools in Rajasthan qualify for the world’s best engineering colleges. Months later, validation came in the form of a USD 180-million investment by Reliance Industries.

This is, to date, the largest artificial intelligence (AI) investment in an ed-tech company globally. Embibe now has seven million users from across the country. Her focus to drive massive impact enabled us to overcome any barrier. Nothing meaningful comes easy, and Embibe is no exception.