Vriti: a player in Online Exam Prep

“India is a land of examinations. We have 600 of them every year”. That’s how Swapnil Shrivastav described the potential of his business, Viti. Viriti is a player in the examination preparation business in India and Mr. Shrivastav was talking to me at 9 PM over telephone. Hard work and exam preparation comes easily to Swapnil. He is an IIT alumni and so are his co-founders. This is his second venture the first being SeekNet, a company which had developed a desktop based search personalized agent.

Vriti is trying to create an online educational community: students, experts and content providers. The core of the technology is a hosted platform which provides community support and an assessment engine. Vriti’s technology is developed in-house on a J2EE platform. The statistics are impressive: at peak loads it handles 115 million users monthly and 20000 concurrent users. I asked Swapnil whether he had considered any open source LMS like Moddle and he said that existing implementations did not have a rich community integration which they desired.

The community is a key part of Vriti’s strategy. There are 1 million students who are a part of the community and about a million questions answered in the database. There are about 300 individual tutors and 300 content providers participating in the community. That is a rich source of guidance to a student entering the bewildering world of career choices. Virti’s strategy towards communities is based on segregating them into sub-sites for each exam (goiit, gocbse, pmtprep, lawcorridor, gobskool, gonift…). The Engineering and CBSE communities are the most vibrant at this point. Vriti’s revenue model depends on commissions paid by content providers (such as Brillant Tutorials, Pearson Education, Aakash Institute …) and from subscription fees paid by students. The basic community participation is free: students pay for taking assessments.

The Indian test prep market according to the CLSA report on the Indian education sector is about USD 1.7 billion. The CLSA estimate engineering, medical, civil services, business school entrance examinations and is based on an average of 4 lac students spending Rs. 25000 on exam prep every year. These are realistic estimates (CLSA accounts for the exam prep for CBSE separately). Career Launcher (investor: Gaja Capital), Catura Systems (investor: DFJ India) are the other relatively early stage companies in this area. Vriti’s Series A was funded by Intel Capital. Needless to say, there are several well established brands in the more traditional distance education and bricks and mortar modes of test prep services (Brilliant Tutorials, Rau’s Study Circle …)

There is scope to create strong businesses in this area based on a track record of consistent success and low cost of delivery leveraging Internet technologies. However, the idea behind Vriti could be potentially far bigger. To understand why, think of the category of Learning Management Systems and Performance Management Systems. Most large enterprises use some variation of these systems powered by “best of breed” vendors such as SumTotal Systems & Saba, pure SaaS players like Learn.com & SuccessFactors or ERP players like Oracle and Saba. What is the broad functionality they provide? At the highest level, they help manage the skills and competencies possessed by individuals with that required by jobs and help employees bridge the necessary gaps.

Consider the individual student at the cross roads of career choices. The solution that she is looking for is an ongoing assessment of knowledge and skills and help to prepare for career choices. It is possible to create a disruption by focusing on the technology platform that allows for the following:

• A strong assessment engine that allows students to assess their learning needs and career potentials
• A skills and knowledge library that helps students understand the requirements of various competitive examinations
• A social networking layer to allow students seek guidance from peers and mentors
• Integrations with web conferencing tools to allow for online tutoring
• Integrations with content providers to provide for delivery of both off-line and on-line content

The key thing is to focus on the platform and that is why I feel that Vriti might be poking around a big thing. Think of the platform from the standpoint of both the student and the content provider. A strong assessment engine and strong assessment content would enable students to make correct choices. But you can also potentially open up the platform for content providers and experts to run their own assessments. That way they would be able to target their learning interventions to the specific student needs. They would be able to deliver the learning in current “chunks” and also leverage outside teaching help. The platform would generate value for the content provider that would be difficult to create from their own web delivery sites.

“Get to know what you are good at and work hard at it”. That is what the preacher told Rabbit “Harry” in John Updike’s Rabbit Run. If stated this way, the exam prep market is a far bigger game. And it will be fun to see companies take a crack at it.