How ed-tech startups are helping aspirants ace Indian Railways, other government jobs, competitive exams

You should not be surprised when you read that MBA graduates, engineers and Ph.D. degree holders have applied for various government jobs. This is mainly due to the craze of government jobs among the jobseekers and among those who are even employed in the private sector. This craze has worked wonders for the ed-tech startups working in the sector. Besides this, youth have been joining these App based platforms for competitive exams like JEE and NEET.

Startups like GradeUp and Adda247 have been growing since inception and the recent recruitment by various government department including Indian Railways have helped them expand their base.

Recently, Gradeup, one of India’s largest preparation platform for competitive exams, claimed that its exam-specific community has crossed 13 million registered users. The company has crossed this milestone within a span of just 3.5 years, since its inception in 2015. 

Gradeup is freely available to anyone who downloads the app or visits the website. Anyone who is preparing for competitive exams has access to material to practice and prepare for their exam. Further, users can avail platform’s premium offerings including ‘Classroom live courses’ and Test Series to enhance their preparation.

Shobhit Bhatnagar, Co-founder, Gradeup said, "The success rate for competitive exams is between 1 to 3 percent on an average. We have seen that those who prepare with Gradeup generally have a success rate that is 2-3X greater than the average, and we hope to take this higher.”

Gradeup is expanding at a rapid pace and is expecting revenue growth of 3X in 2019-2020 as compared to the current fiscal. They currently have 2 lakh transacting users, and expect this figure to reach 5 lakhs by next year end. The platform’s top 5 markets are Hyderabad, Patna, Lucknow, Delhi and Pune. In terms of users, the company has jumped from 6.8 million users in FY17-18 to 13 million already and is confident that it will reach 15 million registered users by the end of the current financial year. 

Bhatnagar said that the company is focussing on enhancing its online reach. 

"This year we are focusing on building deeper services which add value to the students with services like Classroom - A comprehensive planned approach towards exam preparation. We will also keep adding new exam categories to reach to different segments of our audience & becoming a comprehensive source of exam preparation," said Bhatnagar.

Bhatnagar said that the company has registered 100% growth in revenue during FY 2017-2018 to FY 2018-2019 and is expecting 300% growth during FY2019-2020.

GradeUp currently has more than 5 lakh active users in Railways category alone. 

On the other hand, Adda247, another popular education-technology company, has reached a milestone of more than 10 million registered users on the platform. In terms of the geographic distribution of users on Adda247, the highest number of users on the platform belong to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, followed by Delhi, Maharashtra, and Telangana.

Adda247 was launched in 2016 with a goal to reach out to those candidates/students who were unable to enrol at offline coaching centres to prepare for various government examinations. It provides contents related to bank exams (like PO, Clerk, etc.), SSC exams (like CGL, CHSL, etc.) and other government jobs. The channel has grown from 11.3K subscribers a month to approximately 132.62K every month in just a span of 3 years. 

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Anil Nagar, Founder & CEO, Adda247 said, "We will further leverage our traction and position in the market to continue to work towards taking our subscriber count to 50%, or around 5 million, more than the existing number.”

Adda247 has its YouTube channel where it provides educational videos related to various government exams. At present, it has 2,640,271 subscribers and it aims to take its subscriber count to 5 million by December 2019 and 10 million by December 2020. In addition, the company is also seeking to reach out to more than 50 million learners by increasing video views by 10x over the next 2 years.