2 Ed. Tech - Teachmint, Classplus draw a post-pandemic map for B2B edtech.. A study conducted on the ED. Tech by our Team - Yusuf Bhandarkar

A few months ago, a very fast friend of mine, teaching students in grades 5-7 online via Zoom, made a cardinal error. He shared the meeting link with his students but forgot to enable the Waiting Room feature, which allows the host to control which participant joins the meeting. The link ended up being shared with friends of some of his students, who logged in using anonymous names and began using their teenage imagination while posting annotations and notes during the live class.

My friend learnt his lesson quickly. Today, he makes sure access is restricted to his students who use their proper names. But video conferencing platforms like Zoom are still restrictive and can't solve for the nuances of online education. Like seamlessly sharing study material, assignments, and tests with students.

Now, more than a year into the pandemic, startups have risen to the occasion to solve these issues. While most of the Indian companies that rode the edtech wave over the last year have been B2C, startups like Teachmint and Classplus are focussed on B2B, i.e. the teachers.

Teachmint, launched in April 2020, is an edtech “infrastructure” layer that contains everything a teacher needs to teach online. That includes a video-conferencing platform and even features for easily distributing handwritten tests and study material via the app.

Teachmint has grown so quickly in just over a year that it could soon join a very elite club of Indian edtech unicorns, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Byju’s and Unacademy. It’s reportedly in talks to raise a $70 million Series C round at a valuation of $500 million.

Six-year-old Classplus, which focuses on coaching institutes, claims to have 100,000 teachers on board, catering to over 10 million students through their virtual classrooms. It has raised $65 million in total from marquee investors like Tiger Global and GSV.

But while edtech is one of the hottest sectors right now, this golden age may not last long. "Screen fatigue" is increasingly entering our vocabularies, and schools are slowly starting to open up around the country. Where do these B2B edtechs go from here?