EdTech startups like Byju’s, Unacademy, Toppr mostly cater to students of metro cities leaving a major audience of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. This issue was identified by Neetin Agarwal and Nikhil Sharma, co-founders of DronStudy. This duo of old friends wanted to make online education accessible for the smaller cities as well and therefore they conceptualized DronStudy in 2016.
This Surat-based startup provides online classes for students from 8th grade to 12th grade and preparation for competition exams like JEE and NEET. According to Neetin, the coaching industry is disorganised and it is a task for parents to find an apt coaching tutor for their kids. With world moving online, even parents are looking for a coaching solution online.
The co-founders come with experience in tech world and education and share a common passion of changing lives of students and the way they have been learning for ages. The journey of DronStudy began in 2015 with less than a crore investment. Like any other startup, Neetin and Nikhil too faced challenges like creating the product, right marketing and sales strategy, managing the finances and getting the best out of the team. They powered through them and managed to bring the company to generate revenue of Rs 1.6 crore.
The startup provides live online classes for small batch of students taught by a facilitator. The biggest USP of DronStudy is that it allows studying in Hindi. In next 18 months, they plan on launching tutorials in other regional languages like Kannada, Telugu and Tamil. The YouTube channel of DronStudy has already reached a benchmark of 1 million subscribers. They have an in-house team to create content and 100+ facilitators working from home. They also aspire to empower tutors to provide the optimum learning to the students.
DronStudy provides a class at as less as Rs 25 making it affordable for students from all backgrounds. It works on a subscription model where learners can pay annually or monthly based on their convenience. The founders strongly believe in the use Artificial Intelligence in the field of education to make it more customisable based on student’s needs. Their future plans are simple to make the company reach Rs 500 crore mark and double the number of users in next 18 months.