Batten Foundation backed Studycopter to help students with 'adaptive' GMAT test preparation

Wednesday August 14, 2013 , 3 min Read

Aji Jain — Adi Jain has had an illustrious academic career with a focus on education. An MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Adi has worked with multiple technology companies, educational and publishing enterprises, and with the World Bank on tech-enabled educational initiatives for close to a decade. The idea for Studycopter was rather serendipitous but it was always on the offing that Adi would startup within the education domain.

Started in Charlottesville, VA (USA), Studycopter has launched with test preparation for GMAT before expanding to other tests. The startup was a part of the iLab incubator and went on to raise a seed round from the Batten Foundation. Adi is also a part of the 2013 cohort of the Startup Leadership Program-New Delhi Chapter. The company is now based out of New Delhi and has a total of 9 people working on the product. “I always wanted to come back to India and felt that it would be a better market to start out with test preparation because of the enormity of scope,” says Ad about his decision to come back to India.

“We believe that personalization of content, iterative feedback, and dynamic intervention can go a long way in allowing students to learn and retain knowledge better,” says Adi. Studycopter signs up with well-known global content creators and has an algorithm which helps the student study adaptively. This means that Studycopter is a curation layer over the available study material and it tells the student what to study next according to his or her performance. “We are also committed to piggybacking on the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, increasing internet penetration, and computers in students' lives (BYOD) to disseminate knowledge more effectively,” adds Adi.

The beta of the website was launched in January 2013 and since then Studycopter has seen students sign up from the Americas, Europe, and India. There are paid users as well but details about the same haven’t been revealed. At the moment, students can access Studycopter for free for 7 days on the web or through the Android app. Once they are satisfied with the product and are convinced of its value, they can choose to buy a subscription for a limited time. The current list price is Rs. 1599.00 for a four-month subscription.

Studycopter has content license for 5 other tests but the first step is to build good traction for GMAT and make the adaptive model more meaningful by having more students use the platform. Test Prep as a sector is filled with players in India (we recently covered 100 marks and MyTestBuddy) but majority of them are focusing on cracking entrances for engineering. Studycopter has started off with GMAT and their fate with this step will determine their future course.

Website: Studycopter

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