Inventing Tailor-made Courses Got this Edupreneur Into Entrepreneur

Tribal students unknown to computers cracked national competitive pre-engineering and pre-medical exams.

Published on 23 Mar 2019

The testament of Embibe founder Aditi Avasthi’s unrelenting passion for improving the state of education in India is evident from factoid that students associated with Embibe achieved remarkable outcomes in seemingly unfavourable situations. Embibe’s pilot project was with the tribal students of Rajasthan, who were unknown to computers before Embibe’s intervention. The students were not only confident but also went on to crack the most competitive pre-engineering and pre-medical exams in India. Embibe, a deep personalization platform, is designed to deliver learning and life outcomes for students.

By keeping artificial intelligence and data science at the core of the platform, the company empowers both students and educators. When asked about Byju’s, she says, “While Byju’s is a video learning company, for Embibe, learning videos are just one aspect of achieving personalization. Our goal is not to create one video per topic, but to create a range of learning media, which caters to every learning style.”

Aditi took on entrepreneurship with an aim to democratize education, but building a deep technology platform company in India was a challenge.

The limitations in her personal education experience spurred her to solve the problem of sub-standardised, rigorous education techniques followed in India. She devised a dynamic self-updating curriculum designed on the principles of self-learning. This was achieved by creating Embibe’s Knowledge Graph, which is modelled over the years, by identifying how the mind actually learns, powered by machine learning.

Building a deep technology platform company in India, where the market was not ready, was a challenge. “Similar to learning outcomes, intent is a big part of getting things right. Curating a team of stakeholders in the early years, which included investors, shareholders, and employees, was difficult. I continuously built a shared narrative and kept intent as a filter for the people who came on board,” she states.

Initially, Kalaari Capital and Lightbox were early-stage investors for Embibe in 2013. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) led a strategic investment, buying a major stake of around 73 per cent in Embibe in 2018.