Vedantu has expanded its offerings from school subjects to include extra-curricular courses like art, public speaking, and creative writing among others, and plans to raise a new funding round soon.
BYJU’S-owned WhiteHat Jr also launched online music classes last month. Vedantu directly competes with WhiteHat Jr and BYJU’S in the K12 segment. According to reports, Vedantu was in acquisition talks with edtech major BYJU’S. However, Vedantu denied any such acquisition plans and said that the company will be raising a new funding round instead.
Extra-curricular courses
The program, launched under the title V-Nurture and Super School, adds 16 new courses on the platform. Talking about the vision behind this launch, Vedantu co-founder and product head, Pulkit Jain, said that the idea is to create lots of avenues for young learners to explore their talents and also create a holistic learning environment for Vedantu students.
“School is not just about studies, students also evolve as a person there because of the opportunities and exploration possibilities available to them. That’s why we have used the word ‘school’ in the program’s name. We want to give every Vedantu student a holistic learning environment,” Jain told BusinessLine .
The new list of courses include public speaking, Vedic maths, personality development, world of astronomy, art journaling, two secrets to be an achiever, learn science with DIY experiments, folk and international art, entrepreneurship, be a creative writer, introduction to debating, Sanskrit language, basics of hand drawing, self-defence, and financial literacy.
New investment areas
Jain noted that V-Nurture and Super School courses, along with technology and product, will be some of the investment areas for the company post the new fundraise. “We are investing a lot in evolving how teaching-learning should happen, and the new courses will be one of our investment areas as well,” he added.
While school education moved online after the pandemic, extra-curricular courses have become non-existent for most kids. Since 2020, a clutch of new start-ups offering such non-academic courses has raised funding in this emerging segment including Yellow Class, Frontrow and Kyt.
The program started at Vedantu last year, as a free-spirited initiative, where teachers hosted workshops on topics that they were interested in or had experience teaching. The initial pilot workshops were only open to existing Vedantu students and are said to have engaged 80% of the existing students. The V-Nurture program is focused on students of Grades 6-13 and the courses focusing on students from kindergarten until grade 8 is termed Super School. The courses are currently offered as free live classes.
“We kept these courses free, so that there is less resistance among students to try out these courses, outside of their regular school subjects. It is definitely not a revenue problem for us, because we already have paid courses. More than that, such courses will help us to engage students more deeply with the Vedantu platform,” said Jain.
Live online learning platform
Founded in 2011, Vedantu is a live online learning platform started with the aim of providing affordable quality education to students across India. The company offers individual and group classes to K-12 and test preparation segments. The company platform is said to be capable of tracking student engagements, the effectiveness of teachers and content, and other data related to the classroom activities.
The company follows a multi-teacher model for conducting its classes, where the main teacher (master teacher) teaches a concept and then the students are algorithmically divided into smaller groups to work with their class teachers on classroom activities or doubt resolution. BYJU’S has also recently launched a similar two-teacher model for its online tuition program, BYJU’S Classes.
Vedantu claims to have 150,000 students studying every month on the platform and more than 30 million users every month from over 1,000 cities and more than 40 countries access free content, tests, doubts and videos on Vedantu’s platform and its YouTube channels. The company was last valued at $600 million in its $100 million Series D round in 2020. Vedantu is backed by a clutch of investors including Coatue, Tiger Global, GGV Capital, Omidyar and Westbridge Capital.