Launch to learn

As students at the London School of Economics, cousins Asad Daud (L) and Ali Asgar Kagzi realised that technology offered many benefits that students in tier 2 and tier 3 Indian towns could do with. So they pooled in ₹50 lakh from Daud’s family business and started Genext Students in February 2013 to offer online and mobile tutoring from class I to XII to English-medium ICSE and CBSE and Hindi-medium Rajasthan and UP board students. On offer are notes, test papers, an ‘ask the expert’ feature, a video library and a game-based testing system called Nabumania.

Genext has released eight Android, one iOS and one Windows apps and has 250,000 registered users, 90,000 of them on mobile. While registration and the apps are free, users pay for content using debit/credit cards or mobile balance on Vodafone, Airtel or Idea numbers. It has also tied up with Samsung, with its app available on its tablets free for a year. “The education sphere has the numbers to give tech firms value addition,” says Kagzi. Users are otherwise charged ₹1,599 for a class, ₹250 for a subject, ₹30 for a chapter, ₹1,899 for CDs and ₹2,199 for pen drives. Genext aims to reach 400 million students in five years given its popularity in small-town UP, Rajasthan, Kerala and several Saudi nations.