Looking to upskill staff and make them more productive? Disprz offers personalised learning management for employees
SaaS platform Disprz offers a comprehensive learning management system to help companies on-board and engage employees while increasing their productivity and helping them continuously learn online and update their skills.
Employees are the biggest asset of any company. And one of the best ways to upskill and retain talent is by offering them good training. However, sometimes these training sessions tend to eat up a lot of time. Even the cost of conducting these training sessions across different locations is a big concern for companies.
Subramanian Viswanath and Kuljit Chadha realised they had the skill to change the way corporate learning happened. Armed with the idea of disrupting how learning is accomplished, the duo set up Disprz in 2015.
The Mumbai and Chennai-based company offers a comprehensive learning management solution (LMS). Its multilingual app helps to on-board and engage employees, increase their productivity, and helps them continuously learn online. It works across the spectrum, right from when an employee joins a company.
“Disprz can significantly increase your employee engagement thereby reducing the attrition rate. We can keep your geographically distributed workforce enabled, upskilled and work-ready. Through our unique digital onboarding programme, we can ensure faster and more effective onboarding of new hires, and raise the overall employee productivity,” says Subramanian Viswanath, Co-founder and CEO, Disprz.
Disprz is their second venture in the learning space; the duo sold their first startup in the K12 learning space to a UK-based company. Before this, the founders worked in the corporate and consulting space, respectively. Kuljit is an Indian School of Business (ISB) graduate, and Subramanian is from IIT-Madras.
Their current venture has worked with more than 100 companies, and claims to have three of the world’s top insurance companies using its platform. Some of Disprz’s other prominent customers include Naspers, Delhivery, bankbazaar.com, Hindustan Petroleum, among others. The SaaS-based platform has also raised $2.5 million from IL&FS and Kae Capital.
Spotting an opportunity
The founder-duo claim that their approach was a hypothesis. Their goal was to build a tech platform to deliver training to employees online and simultaneously across different locations. According to them, today's enterprises mainly have two types of workforce - knowledge workers who sit on the bench, and desk-less, frontline workers on the field.
“Each type of workforce has their own set of challenges and needs to be addressed specifically,” says Subramanian.
“Employees need to constantly update themselves on the new-age skills required to keep pace with the major shifts happening around them. Here, the learning provided shouldn’t be push-based, but pull-based - that’s the reason we need a learning experience platform for the knowledge workers,” he adds.
The frontline workforce, on the other hand, is constantly on the move. “Since this workforce is geographically distributed, it’s a big challenge to onboard them as it cannot often happen in the physical classroom. Also, engaging them is very important as attrition rate is high with this type of workforce. Here, technology could play a major role in onboarding, communication and the continuous training of employees,” says Subramanian.
How it works
The platform makes employees follow tasks and ensures they complete it in a certain time. It picks a personalised plan based on employee requests, and ties up with the HR team to follow their progress.
The app also offers continuous learning. If someone has to learn management, then it is not linked to a time frame, and the employee gets to constantly engage with case studies such as client management and execution of sales or marketing strategies. The app pulls all the learning from the cloud, and delivers it to the employees on their phone.
Disprz’s first client and business model
In 2016, Disprz came up with its learning management platform and took it to a company that was looking to remodel its legacy systems. After this, a large Asian corporate, gave them a pilot.
In just six months, the founders say that they were able to show the client that Disprz could train its employees across all channels to work together through learning. The client, who realised that continuous learning helped it increase productivity across roles, signed a long-term contract with Disprz, based on an annual subscription model.
Disprz initially offers a free trial, followed by a subscription model for companies.
“The learning industry is a tricky one with long closure cycles. India is a very difficult market to crack and price realisation is another big problem,” says Subramanian.
He adds that now that they have a good client portfolio, it is becoming easier for them to scale. The company, however, did not want to disclose its revenues since it is a privately held firm. Disprz charges an annual licence fee and it depends on the total number of employees signed in to the learning management system.
The startup has also integrated with leading massive open online course (MOOC) partners to provide off-the-shelf content to its clients.
Also read: How chatbots can play a vital role in employee skill building
Competitors and market
Today, the LMS segment is a huge market, with players like Udacity, Udemi and others offering courses to learners, but are strongly pursuing the corporate world to buy their courses. This is where the learning management system of Disprz comes into play. It can combine different courses and bring it to employees by understanding their needs and requirements. They key being personalised training.
Disprz currently competes with GCube, Liqvid, eNyota Learning, Infopro Learning, EnFin and Upside Learning.
Banking on its success so far, the company is investing heavily in the US and South East Asia markets. It has set up its marketing and inside sales operations in Mumbai, where it is continuously generating leads and runs digital campaigns. In addition to this, Disprz also has three employees in the US who are aggressively selling to the leads that are generated.
According to a Markets and Markets report, the LMS industry is currently estimated to be worth $2 billion and is expected to growt to $7 billion by 2023.
The company was picked by Oracle in its global startup accelerator programme in 2018. Today, the company integrates with Oracle HCM and Oracle Cloud, making it an ideal learning platform for enterprises that run on the Oracle Fusion platform. Oracle has more than 1 lakh customers, and with them, Disprz hopes to disperse knowledge faster to employees.
Disprz wants to sign up more than 500 companies on its platform over the next three years. The company currently has 100 clients using its platform.
Also read: These 7 startups are transforming the K-12 learning space in India
