Edupreneur Village (EV), an initiative of Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS), to catalyze structured, early stage investing in edtech startups, on Friday, invited 12 edtech startups to participate in the event ‘Edupreneur Village Challenge: The Final Battle’ and pitch their ideas for investment in front of high powered panel of judges on stage.
Note: Two startups out of 12 were not present during the event due to some issues that were not mentioned
Besides judges, over 50 EdTech focused Investors and 300 plus EdTech Startups were also present during the event to witness the process.
On the sidelines of the event, Sri Aurobindo Society launched their new initiative “Auro Scholar”, a radical first-of-its-kind Scholarship platform, with the objective to give Micro-Scholarships to produce Learning Outcomes of millions.
This programme aims to create a revolutionary ripple effect among current students across India. For this project, the Society has partnered with PayZapp – Mobile Payment Solution by HDFC Bank – to disburse scholarships, Cambridge University Press as the Question Bank Partner, and Scholr – AI driven homework helping EdTech App.
Scholr also happens to be an investee Company of the Edupreneur Village Fund, and has secured early stage round of funding from a range of financial and strategic investors, led by Edupreneur Village Fund. Using Artificial Intelligence technology, Scholr aims to cater 300 mn students in any vernacular Indian language.
Nitin Bhalla, head of Edupreneur Village said, “The Final Battle is a first-of-its-kind EdTech investment event in India. Today, 10 edtech startups will pitch for the investment from over 50 investors. Initially, we received around 11,000 application to participate in the event, and after a great consideration and discussion, we finalised 10 edtech startups, which will introduce their pitches to the judges and to the investors. Edupreneur Village has been grooming the chosen (10) startups with support sessions to prepare for the final pitch. The start-ups are now ready with a detailed business plan, market research data, information book, and pitch deck to present their ideas to investors keen on investing in the EdTech space, including VC Funds, Angel Networks and Angel Investors.”
In 2018, Edupreneur Village Challenge invited investment applications to participate in the process, and it received around 11,00 early stage startups till Feb 2019.
Later, after giving feedbacks to all the startup applicants to improve their idea and concepts, only 50 startups as part of the Round 1 of the challenge were selected.
The Edupreneur Village supported these 50 startups to create a detailed business information book through iterative investment readiness sessions.
From the 50 startups, 30 startups were invited to pitch their ideas to an investment committee represented by key people from over 15 organisations from the Indian education system during Apr-May 2019.
After which, 12 finalists with an improved business plan were invited to pitch their ideas in the live finale event: The Final Battle.
“India is the center of innovation. The education sector in our country needs new ideas and concepts to uplift its techniques and borders. These edtech startups are not only bringing new ideas to educate students, but also to aware our nation about the edtech startups, that aims at evolving the education system in India. I wish the spirit of competitiveness and compassion should empower the battling startups and keep on innovating new ideas to elevate the education society in India,” said Vijay Bhai, head of Sri Aurobindo Society.
In addition, another initiative of the Sri Aurobindo Society – Zero Investment Innovation in Education Initiatives (ZIIEI), is an education reform programme running in 3 lakh schools across 22 Indian states. 1.5 million school teachers and 30 million school children are part of the ZIIEI programme. Under the Programme, the Society recently launched the Teacher Innovation Award, which is a National Award for zero investment innovative ideas in education initiatives across India, through which the campaign has received more than 8
lakh innovative ideas from teachers across India.
Furthermore, at the end of the event, the results were released to the audience.
The Edupreneur Village Fund declared investment with an undisclosed amount in the Startups- Scholr and Don’t Memorize.
While, other announcements include The Fund’s partnership with Mintbook and with One0x. Other cash prizes announced by the Fund are as follows:
Don’t Memorize won – INR 3 lakh
One0x won – INR 2 lakh
ClapGlobal won – INR 1 lakh
Mintbook won – INR 50,000
Memory Trix won – INR 25,000
Adding on, the event was concluded on the invitation of Edupreneur Village to some of the startups for dinner and private meeting.