This Hyd-based startup is using deep tech analytics to help students ace exams

What rank did you get in IIT? What is your GPA or CGPA? These are questions students get asked while growing up. Given the highly competitive nature of education today, scoring the highest possible marks in an examination has become paramount.

Everyone wants to increase their marks. But teachers have too many students to handle, students are bogged down by immense pressure and parents are often clueless on how to help their children improve or do better.

According to Kiran Babu, the solution to this problem is analytics. “If you can get analytics into education and develop a feedback loop, it can go a long way in engaging students and helping them understand what exactly they need to focus on,” he adds.

Kiran Babu has founded Egnify, an edutech startup that has developed a deep tech solution that uses machine learning and data science to analyse the performance of students and apart from telling them where they lack, it also gives a detailed breakdown of their marks and exactly what a student needs to focus on.

Founded in 2015, Egnify has developed two different products ACADS and JEET to enable educational institutes give students personalised actionable analysis with feedback and recommendations to improve their performance.

The idea is that apart from scoring marks, learning outcomes have to be focused on. Kiran believes that improving performance by pointing out exactly where the student is faltering not only improves performance but also ensures holistic learning from a conceptual level.

ACADS

ACADS is Egnify’s solution for K-10 schools. It has developed a platform where schools can upload the marks of students, which then gets analysed. It analyses where students went wrong, which questions a student is struggling with.

“For students, they can know which particular concept they are lacking in and it even tells them which chapter that is, what page number it is on for students to go back and study and improve, making their learning smart,” Kiran says.

There is a detailed analysis of teachers too, in terms of what questions students in a class performed badly on, helping them understand which concept needs to be focused on and where they are lacking in their teaching. A class teacher can track all the subject teachers too, to understand how they are faring in terms of imparting lessons.

It also tracks their soft skills, their attendance to give parents and the teachers a holistic view of a student’s performance and recommendations for improvement. The real value add here is the fact that feedback is in-depth and personalised for every single student, something a mere report card doesn’t tell.

JEET

Apart from schools, the real opportunity for Egnify, Kiran says, is in the space of IIT-JEE, NEET and other competitive examinations. Given the fierce competitive nature of these exams, Kiran says that its solution has more value proposition. It developed its second product JEET for this segment of students.

Here, the OMR sheets that students answer on are analysed to understand the competency of students in terms of which questions they falter on, which concepts need more focus and how their performance is, compared to the rest of the class. It gives institutes, campus trend analyses, marks-based analysis, error analysis and more.

“For competitive exams, its all about the marks. A single mark makes a huge difference and can even affect ranks. So we analyse not only which concepts a student needs to focus on but where he or she stands,” Kiran adds.

But the real value add for JEET is where it analyses test taking strategies of students. It has practice tests which students takes and then JEET analyses which questions students are taking more time on and gives them feedback on how to optimally use their time during the exams.

Having launched this platform four months ago, Egnify is currently focusing majorly on JEET. It is also building a predictive analysis platform, which helps the student predict how he will do in his next test.

Business Model

For ACADS, Egnify works on a B2B model where it charges the school. There is an upfront fee to install the software, and an annual maintenance charge for the platform.

For JEET, it works on a B2B2C model where it charges institutions a per student fee.

Egnify currently has over 4 lakh students, over 28,000 teachers across 28 cities in four states in India. Its biggest clients is Sri Chaitanya Educational Institutions in Hyderabad.

While there are many edutech companies that are doing similar things, Kiran says that the underlying factor is a pipeline problem. “Many people give basic analytics but we build a feedback loop. We put a lot of effort in making the platform easy for schools to get on board and then they can just plug and play,” he adds.

For JEET, however, there is a lot more competition, Kiran says. But most of them focus on creating content and replacing the teacher. Kiran is firm in saying that Egnify doesn’t want to replace a teacher. The idea is to enable and augment them to make education better.

After solving the feedback loop problem, Egnify will be focusing on testing as well.

And once it models the education segment, Kiran says that its platform has to be applied to other industries as well. “We are a deep tech analytics company. We analyse and give feedback, which can be applied for a lot of things. There is even scope for it in the government - to analyse gender gap, employee performance and a lot more,” he adds.