Teachmint’s journey to 30 countries and 1.5 crore users
The Turning Point is a series of short articles that focuses on the moment when an entrepreneur hit upon a winning idea. This week, we look at ed-infra startup Teachmint.
At a time when words of caution are the norm when it comes to edtech, Teachmint has reached over 30 Southeast and West Asian countries, impacting 1.5 crore teachers and students. The firm has entered Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, among others.
“At this point I would like to point out that there is a big difference between digitisation of education and online learning. We are invested in the former,” says Mihir Gupta, Co-founder, Teachmint.
“Our offerings enable schools, whether offline or online, by helping them optimise processes, save time, and reduce costs while simultaneously aiding teachers with tools to drive greater engagement and efficiencies in classrooms (agnostic of whether online or offline),” he says.
Started in early 2020 to enable offline tutors to seamlessly continue teaching amid the pandemic, education infrastructure platform Teachmint’s flagship product, the Teachmint mobile platform, is a free SaaS-based, mobile-first end-to-end solution.
Teachmint is now available in 20 Indian and international languages, and has catered to 1.5 crore teachers so far.
Plugging a gap
The Bengaluru-based startup is the brainchild of IIT alums Mihir Gupta, Payoj Jain, Divyansh Bordia, and Anshuman Kumar. The four have executive experience at OYO, McKinsey, Swiggy, and Roposo, and were recently featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list.
Payoj Jain, who has been involved in his family's CBSE-affiliated school located in a remote area in Madhya Pradesh, was aware of the on-ground challenges educators face without easy access to tech.
“This allowed us to truly understand the gap in school and teacher digitisation. From multiple, disconnected tools to gaps in the understanding of technology, we realised that a comprehensive digital infrastructure had not been built for schools and educators at scale. We started solving for this by introducing the Teachmint mobile app, which helped teachers digitise their classrooms in minutes,” Mihir recalls.
The Teachmint app allows teachers to take live classes, create and grade assignments, and to share notes.
“What we realised along the way and solved for was creating a mobile-first product that was low-bandwidth optimised. This allowed us to truly penetrate India and expand our presence in more than 5,000 cities and towns. This also gave us a huge opportunity to expand internationally across emerging economies,” Mihir says.
Since then, the startup has expanded its offerings and launched its flagship product, The Integrated School Platform. This SaaS platform enables schools and institutes to digitise all their operations on a single platform and boost efficiencies and outcomes.
Teachmint, currently headquartered in Bangalore, has a team of over 500 employees.
What now?
“As schools have reopened the past year, we have seen high adoption of our offerings and we continue to build deeper capabilities to strengthen it,” Mihir tells YourStory.
In the coming year, the edtech startup will focus on innovating and expanding its product offerings. Other than this, Teachmint aims to go deeper in the markets that it is already present in.
“We are on a mission to expand the potential of education. We strongly believe that infrastructure innovation and enablement can aid transformative institutes like schools to create even greater impact,” Mihir says.
Edited by Teja Lele