This Delhi-based bootstrapped startup aims to help school kids learn important life skills early
Founded in 2021, Delhi-based startup Kidzpreneur helps children learn life skills that are important to excel in real life.
Shishir Miglani — a tech evangelist and CEO of Kurativz Technologies — was using his startup coaching skills to train underprivileged kids on problem-solving and life skills at a school.
To his surprise, most of the children not only brought innovative ideas but also had clarity in explaining how they wanted to execute them.
This was the genesis of Kidzpreneur — a platform for children to learn life skills that are important to excel in real life.
The platform helps kids build problem-solving, creativity, communication/storytelling, money management, and design thinking, among other skills, to absorb and initiate conversations relevant to their career goals.
While the startup was under Shishir’s technology company Kurativz Technologies — a mobile app development company — close to a year, it was formally launched in 2021 in Delhi-NCR once it finalised its minimum viable product (MVP).
Besides helping students build life skills, the e-learning startup also supports them with initial funding and mentorship through a Noida-based accelerator programme.
The early days
Shishir teamed up with Amit Mishra and Monika Miglani to engage with students and fill the gap between regular education with real-life skills they need to develop to be successful.
Amit has been teaching and promoting entrepreneurship across India, especially in smaller towns, for a long time. Monika, too, is an active community builder and mentor with experience in the startup ecosystem.
“We provided this unique roadmap, which no one is offering so far — a platform to test the students learning in real life. We are doing this under a government recognised accelerator platform, where post-coaching, the accelerator provides initial funding to students to explore the execution of their ideas. This is where the game plan changed, and various government agencies working on entrepreneurial mindset curriculum reached out to seek help to offer students a path to real-world experiences,” Shishir tells YourStory.
Kidzpreneur also started a series of intervention programmes, which helped the students further build on their ideas. “Today, we are proud to have three money-earning startups from this batch of students,” says Shishir.
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the startup to do a course correction in its overall strategy and move from an offline engagement company to an online platform, which imparts smart life skills to everyone with internet access.
“The New Education Policy (NEP 2020) talks about the same principles and skills that need to be enhanced, which are part of our curriculum for the past two years. With our experience and technology platform offerings, we see ourselves working closely with more stakeholders in the education sector,” says Shishir.
What does it do?
Kidzpreneur is designed to complement the already established school education system so that parents understand the usefulness of real-life skills going forward.
While spending time with school kids, Shishir and Amit saw a great potential to create life skill programmes beyond the school curriculum — a more deep-rooted and scalable programme that can create a larger impact on students from various schools and regions.
The founders decided to club their experiences of building products and supporting early-stage entrepreneurs to build an accelerator programme headquartered in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
Through this programme, Kidzpreneur supports selected student ideas and turns them into businesses. At present, it is mentoring students from six countries.
In fact, the startup also mentors and supports startups who are building products and services for the state and beyond at the grass-root level.
The workings
Kidzpreneur has a series of curated interventions created from the founder’s own learnings and the combined wisdom of other experienced professionals who have built similar activity-oriented programmes.
These programmes help students to understand different concepts, while they can leverage those learnings to work on their ideas even in real life.
Schools and students individually can get access to Kidzpreneur’s proprietary community platform to share their ideas, engage with peers, and even access relevant resources to continuously refine their learnings.
“We have also collaborated with one of the leading technology ideation platforms, which is used by student entrepreneurs in over 20 countries to offer them to students in India,” says Shishir.
The bootstrapped startup operates both B2B and B2C business models. In its B2B segment, the startup offers its programmes to schools and government agencies to help those students who come through them.
In its B2C segment, it runs smaller programmes for kids funded directly by their parents.
Kidzprenuer is engaged with almost 35 schools. It also has one of the engaging education information channels on Facebook, where it has spoken to over 200 professionals from over 12 countries who share their experience and wisdom with the viewers.
“Our unique client base are the state governments of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, along with various individual schools. We also undertake CSR supported programmes, where we run both digital and non-digital platforms for learning and impart this learning for as low as Rs 299 a month,” says Shishir.
Market and future
RedSeer predicts the online K-12 education space will grow by 6.3 percent, creating a $1.7 billion market by 2022. According to Statista, the global e-learning market was pegged at $101 billion in 2019. By 2026, the market is expected to grow exponentially to reach over $370 billion.
The focus on extracurricular activities in schools is growing in India, with platforms like Sequoia India Capital-backed Kyt, IIT alum-founded KidEx, and Matrix India Partners-backed Crejo.Fun.
“Soon, we expect to involve a higher level of technology that will allow schools and parents to map the strength of students and craft a customised learning solution for them. With our current and future plans of execution, we foresee taking the platform to at least five million students over the next five years,” says Shishir.
Edited by Suman Singh