At Krishworks, we help rural entrepreneurs to set up their own after-school centres to teach the English language to village kids through a simple tablet-based solution.
Rural parents have no convenient and affordable options to teach their children communication in English. In these remote areas, tuition teachers are usually sub-standard but charge exorbitant fees without even assuring the desired outcome. Here, online/digital- only solutions are particularly ineffective because of the nature of ‘English’ as a subject and the inadequate knowledge required for using technology. So, Krishworks decided to fulfil the need to have an affordable, high quality solution which gives the children the best of both worlds, that is, guidance of a teacher and digital content.
Today, our total addressable market comprises all the school going children in India, which is approximately a $10 billion market. However, initially we are targeting children attending grades I-VIII in rural India, which is estimated to be a market of over $7 billion.
The idea to set up this start-up with the help of the other team members- Subhajit Roy, Gargi Mazumdar and Kaushik Mazumdar- clicked when we were contemplating to participate in the Global Learning XPRIZE – a 15 million dollar competition funded by Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX- to develop software autonomously to teach children. We worked on a game to achieve that objective over a period of 2 years and finished among the top 38 teams in the world among the 198 teams which had participated. Now, we have grown to a team of 9 members working from all corners of the country.
Prior to starting Krishworks, Subhajit had initiated the healthcare products division in American Megatrends, where he developed patented healthcare products which went on to be used by the Government of India and DRDO. Gargi is a software engineer and passionate teacher, who has volunteered for various NGOs and gave up a stint with Teach For India to be a part of Krishworks. Kaushik is an experienced systems programmer who has made multiple contributions to the open source game engine Godot, while I am a graduate from NITK Surathkal, and have also worked in Marketing and Product Management roles at high-growth start-ups.
At present, we follow a micro-franchise model. Initially, the entrepreneur pays a certain amount for the training and materials as franchise fee, thereafter; he shares a portion of his monthly revenues. We are currently running 21 centres with approximately 1000 children expected to be enrolled by this year. We are also exploring partnership opportunities with schools, NGOs, corporates and skilling organizations.