This Pune-based SaaS startup is helping universities and colleges conduct online exams

Digitisation in the education industry in India was already under way, but gained momentum amid the COVID-19 pandemic when schools and colleges shifted online almost overnight.

But entrepreneur Anupam Mangudkar has been working to help colleges and universities make the digital shift since 2011. 

Anupam, along with his brother, Utkarsh Mangudkar, and former colleague, Ramkrishna Kulkarni, launched Pune-based WeShine Tech Pvt Ltd to provide examination process automation solutions. 

Its flagship product, UniApps, provides a suite of applications that help automate university examination processes. It also enables complete student lifecycle management, from student enrolment to issuing certificates.

Anupam, who was working as a software engineer in 2008, reveals that he faced some difficulties while using their internal training assessment evaluation platform. 

“The same year, prestigious CAT exams went online and there were many hiccups. I realised that there was a problem and wanted to build a solution to solve this,” he tells YourStory. 

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SaaS solution for educational institutes  

Speaking about the early journey, Anupam says the team began working on an online examination solution. 

“At that same time, coincidentally, Pune University began conducting MCQ exams for a few of its courses and we got an opportunity to showcase our innovation. We started working on the solution and launched our first product, which was focused on MCQ-based exams,” he says.

After this, the team connected with several educational institutes to understand more about their issues related to generating and managing question papers, managing student results, online assessment of the papers among others, and came up with tech solutions to solve them. Now, all these applications have been consolidated and are provided under the UniApps suite.

Apart from the online examination system, the UniApps suite also allows institutes to help in online onboarding of students, managing question papers, online marking of tests, and processing results among others.

“The data on students, exams, etc are all hosted safely on Amazon cloud. We use Amazon’s private cloud system and data is always customer-owned for us. Apart from this, after a session or exam is over, we hand over the entire data for backup in whichever format they want,” Anupam says.

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Business and more

The co-founder explains that the SaaS startup provides its suite of applications to educational institutes on a subscription basis. He reveals that the charges depend on the basis of the scale - the number of students, exam papers, etc.

Colleges and universities can either subscribe to the entire suite or opt for particular modules.

“We are working with more than 20 universities across five states. We are scaling up our presence pan-India and now more so because of COVID-19. We are working with institutions such as the University of Mumbai, Goa University, Pune University, Gujarat Technological University among others,” Anupam says.

According to a report by Verified Market Research, the global online exam software market is growing at a CAGR of 8.53 percent and projected to reach $8,851.69 Million by 2027. 

Surat-based edtech startup Gradeazy offers similar services. It provides an intuitive performance assessment platform to educational institutions for conducting any type of tests, ranging from MCQ to subjective tests. Rajkot-based ConductExam also offers online software for exams.

Anupam reveals that the startup was launched with an initial investment of Rs 1.5 Lakh and has been bootstrapped since then and claims to be growing organically. WeShine is now looking for strategic funding from equity investors who would help grow the business. 

Speaking about future plans, Anupam says the startup is looking for strategic partners across India to further expand its footprint.

The co-founder explained that the platform can also be used by schools and also revealed that the startup is in talks with ICSE and CBSE boards for this. However, he reiterates that the startup will for now focus mostly on the higher education segment.