The Reliance in the news of acquisition of non operative company and now the Jio-fying education with Embibe Yusuf Bhandarkar - The MMS

So inexpensive it's ridiculous. Everyone's suspicious but interested. Even the naysayers are coming around to it.

And before you know it, you're part of the ecosystem.

That's the short version of how Jio brought the internet to pretty much every phone in India, that's Great source of marketing at initial stage of FREE subscription, the result you all know. My dad switched to Jio, mom switched to Jio, and my sister—very quietly—went and got herself a second SIM (obviously Jio) to bring her data expenses down to almost nothing.

At some level, this happened in most households you know. And then, more significantly, it happened in households that had never owned a smartphone before. And now, Jio's parent Reliance is doing it all over again. This time with education.

Edtech has grown leaps and bounds in India over the past couple of years, propelled forward by a pandemic that had children learning more on their screens and less inside classrooms. But then Reliance thought, 'Why should Byju's have all the fun?' and it bought a small, nine-year-old startup Embibe for a 73% stake in 2018. Embibe was no Byju's or Unacademy, or Vedantu, but it aligned with Reliance in making education cheap and accessible.

Since the acquisition, though, Reliance has pumped money into its edtech champion—over $78 million—to revamp Embibe's video library and analytics and help it acquire a litany of smaller edtechs to beef up its offering. Reliance's Embibe, which is all set to relaunch in January 2022, will be offered to schools at as low as Rs 500 (~$7) per child per year—the average is Rs 3,000-4,000 ($40-$53). Not only is this Jio-like in pricing, but there's a larger Jio game at play—disrupting a market that's just beyond the incumbents’ reach.

In Jio's case, it was a matter of connecting tier-3 cities, small towns, and villages. With Embibe, it's to teach in-school and not after school—which is the market Byju's rules over. According to information sourced by www.multimediastudio.net that Embibe is aggressively hiring an on-ground sales force to sell its online platforms—website and app—to schools.

Not just that, Embibe is supposedly run on an AI-powered system that can accurately predict gaps in a student's learning. It can tell if a child has gotten an answer right by fluke or wasted their attempts at getting answers right.

There's also an AI bot called Mb that guides users' whole experience. "The idea is that eventually, it's going to be personalised to you like your Netflix account. Embibe will have to work out how to onboard students and teachers to it," says a former manager who watched Embibe’s product develop in-house.

And, of course, Reliance is all about bringing the user into the Reliance ecosystem. A family that uses Jio to access Embibe for their kids are bound to get some perks, right?