Teachmint Looks To Tap Online Tutoring Demand With Seed Funding From Lightspeed, Others

Covid-19 not only changed the everyday learning experience for students, but has transformed how tutors and private teachers go about their work. Bengaluru-based edtech startup Teachmint is looking to capitalise on the demand from the tutor ecosystem for technology tools and SaaS products to manage the new reality. 

Speaking to Inc42, cofounder and CEO Mihir Gupta said that Teachmint is envisioned as a one-stop solution for tutors and teachers who have had to use Facebook Live, Google Meet or Zoom to teach students. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $3.5 Mn in a seed round, led by Lightspeed India, with participation from existing investors Better Capital and Titan Capital.

Founded by Mihir Gupta, Payoj Jain, Divyansh Bordia and Anshuman Kumar in May 2020, Teachmint enables teachers to conduct online classes through a two-way interactive learning solution with video sharing and more. Besides this, it offers a tutoring management SaaS to help teachers mark attendance, conduct tests, create individual classrooms and projects, share learning material and more. 

The company plans to use the fresh capital for product development, increasing its reach among tutors, adding more features to the SaaS platform and support for more categories of users. Apart from English, Teachmint claims to be available in 10 languages. Before the latest round, it had raised seed funding from Better Capital and Titan Capital in August.

Teachmint’s product bundles interactive classroom environment with a SaaS dashboard on a subscription basis for tutors. It allows teachers to manage their daily classes in a more transparent manner than using different third-party tools for each aspect.  The startup claims to have over 1 lakh tutors on board and is said to be used in more than 1,000 cities in India. Teachmint’s competitors include other players such as Teacherr, ODA Class, eduZilla, SkoolApp, Classplus among others.

“Our idea is that teachers take the front row, they come on board and try the tools and become their own brand through the unique ways of teaching and bring them online. That’s the fundamental difference between us and other edtech startups,” Teachmint’s Gupta said. 

The cofounder added that edtech startups like BYJU’S, Vedantu and others operate in a content-first model which is basically recording content or animation that are eventually given to the students.

“Our company believes that it is almost impossible to eliminate the involvement of teachers,” he emphasised. 

Besides healthy adoption and penetration for B2C edtech products in the past two quarters, the digital learning wave has also recently lifted prospects of B2B startups looking to cater to institutions and teachers. Of course, Teachmint is targeting the teacher layer in the value chain, whereas many other B2B products are looking at solving institutional challenges for colleges and universities, which have also attracted investor interest in the past few months.