How this ed-infra startup reached over 30 countries and 4 acquisitions in less than 2 years

Started in early 2020 to enable offline tutors to seamlessly continue teaching amid the pandemic, education infrastructure platform Teachmint’s flagship product Teachmint mobile platform is a free SaaS-based mobile-first end-to-end solution.

Founded by IIT graduates Mihir Gupta, Divyansh Bordia, and Anshuman Kumar (all from IIT Bombay) and Payoj Jain (IIT Delhi), the startup claims to have reached over 10 million (one crore) teachers and students in less than two years, and aims to scale this to over 100 million users globally in the near term.  

To achieve this, Bengaluru-headquartered Teachmint is extensively growing its teams and hiring skilled talent, especially across product, technology, and design, Mihir tells YourStory in an exclusive interaction.

“We started 2021 with a 20-member team, and are at 400+ members today. We will be over 100 percent in terms of team strength this year, with a strong focus on tech, product and design talent,” he says.

Backed by leading investors such as Rocketship.vc, Vulcan Capital, Learn Capital, Goodwater Capital, Epiq Capital, CM Ventures, Lightspeed India, Better Capital and Titan Capital, the startup is one of the fastest in the education sector to raise $118 million in just 16 months since inception.

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The platform has also initiated an industry-first Continuous ESOP Liquidity Plan (CELP) to reward and recognise the contributions of its team. The startup claims to be among the first Indian startups to give its team members complete control over the liquidation of their ESOPs.

“Any member of Teachmint’s workforce will be able to liquidate their vested ESOPs against cash at any point of time over the next one year. What differentiates this initiative is that it puts the timing and quantum of such liquidation in complete control of the individual. An initiative like CELP will also fuel the company’s hiring initiatives and help us groom top quality talent,” says Mihir. 

Diverse suite of ed-infra products

As an ‘ed-infra’ startup, Teachmint provides a suite of education infrastructure products which enables all education providers; from K-12 schools to after-school tutoring, universities, creators and even edtechs to digitise through end-to-end technology enablement.

Available on android and iOS, the Teachmint mobile app enables any educator to digitise their classrooms, purportedly in under two minutes. 

“The app offers a mobile-first infra to teachers to run engaging online classrooms with features like live class and class recordings, automated attendance, live polls, auto generated tests and grading, live chat as well as assignment sharing among others. By using Teachmint, educators can run all their classroom operations on one platform, and do not need to use multiple platforms to connect with their students,” claims Mihir.

Keeping its core product free for educators, the startup claims to have completed over 5 billion minutes of live learning through its platform. 

Available in 20 Indian and International languages, the platform has seen rapid expansion to 30 Southeast and West Asian countries. The firm has made its presence felt in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, among others. Teachmint has also introduced local languages including Arabic, Thai, Indonesian Bahasa, and Vietnamese and will add more soon.

Speaking about its expansion, Mihir adds, “Teachmint is largely a geography-agnostic product because unlike a conventional edtech player, we do not create content. When it comes to scaling, we don’t need to think about the content. Our global expansion can be rapid,”

Over the past few months, the startup has also built and scaled its paid and enterprise-level offerings to offer more value to the educator ecosystem. These include - 

Teachmint for Institute (TFI) an end-to-end institute management offering which has various plans like Basic (free), Advanced and Pro. Adopted by 5000+ institutes till date from across India, TFI is an offering for schools, higher educational institutes, universities, coaching centers, to help them digitize, manage, and run virtual or hybrid classrooms effectively. 

Teachmore, a Vadodara-based startup acquired by Teachmint in Dec 2021, that enables teachers, creators, and freelancers to create and sell their courses through their own websites or mobile applications, and

Teachstack, a developer-focused offering enabling edtech organisations to deliver a distinctive online learning experience to their students. The offering claims to significantly reduce go-to-market time for edtech players by providing them ready-to-launch classroom solutions. 

“We have partnered with multiple edtech startups across India and Asia to help them build learning solutions, like Shikho in Bangladesh and Pandai in Malaysia,” adds Mihir.

The startup has also partnered with various govt administrations to power education, live learning and digitisation across government schools. This includes the administration of Punjab and Karnataka, where the startup is enabling digitisation in close to 1000 government schools overall.

In addition to government partnerships, Teachmint is also aiming at partnering with NGOs, social welfare institutions and corporates with the conviction that a collaborative approach will create an ecosystem that will benefit the most vulnerable groups.

Expansion and way ahead

To expand its offerings across multiple product lines and geographies, Teachmint has made four acquisitions so far. 

Last year in December, the startup made three acquisitions - Teachmore, Teachee (India team- acqui-hire) and Airlearn. 

Teachmint acquired Vadodara-based course-selling startup Teachmore to deepen the company’s business support layer for its teachers. Post the acquisition, Teachmore’s product continues to operate independently while also integrating on the Teachmint platform. This integration has further expanded Teachmint’s 'course-selling' offering, helping its community of millions of teachers grow their teaching business. 

Post this, the startup acqui-hired the Indian arm of edtech startup Teachee. Launched in India in October 2020 by Vlight Technology Pte, a Singapore-based company, Teachee helps educators and creators sell courses online.

This comes close on the heels of Teachmint’s acquisition of Teachmore. With this, close to 20 members of Teachee’s India team are now a part of Teachmore by Teachmint, strengthening the company’s course-selling offering and enabling it’s community of millions of teachers to grow their online presence. 

In the same month, the startup acquired video engagement platform Airlearn in a cash and stock deal. This will enable the startup to expand its developer offerings called Teachstack, which enables edtech companies to build state-of-the-art classroom solutions for their users. 

In January this year, the company marked its fourth acquisition with MyClassCampus - an educational ERP player which enables campuses with end-to-end digitisation of their operations, management, and communication. 

The startup has also launched its program ‘TeachBharat’ this week in which the company pledges to digitise over 10,000 schools in India for free. With this, Teachmint aims at enabling over 2,00,000 teachers who in turn can empower over 50 lakh children by breaking geographical barriers and ensuring continuous learning.

To commence the initiative, Teachmint has already partnered with the administration in Punjab as well as Karnataka to power close to 1000 government schools. 

Under TeachBharat, the company will enable end-to-end digitisation of the identified schools through its ‘Teachmint For Institute’ offering, Teachmint’s proprietary platform designed to help institutes become future-ready. With this, the schools will be able to digitise their operations and ensure their students have continuous access to teachers and learning content at all times. 

TeachBharat will enable institutions to not only be able to take virtual classes but also help them create a hybrid teaching setup, to help them maximise reach and impact.