Toppr is a leading after-school learning platform providing personalized learning solutions for school students across India. It caters between 5th grade and 12th grade, covering almost all the school boards in India.
The platform also helps students prepare for different entrance and competitive exams in India. Toppr currently serves over 15 million students, with over 1 million sessions every day, and more than 3 million learning pieces, including adaptive practice questions, solutions, concepts, games, and videos for the students. It has solved 21 million-plus doubts and has had more than 38 million tests taken on its platform till date.
Toppr has seen massive growth in terms of both usage and revenue, especially in the last few months. Last year, the company has focused its revenue to surpass $100 million mark by 2020. With school closures and massive surge in demand for online learning solutions due to COVID-19 pandemic, Toppr must have achieved lots more, though the company hasn’t disclosed its revenue for the year yet.
In an interview at EdTech 2020, India’s largest EdTech conference and expo, Zishaan Hayath, Co-founder and CEO, Toppr, shared about the company, what they do, how they scale the technology, and how AWS products and services help them focus on what they do – providing personalized learning solutions to school students across India, among others.
Zishaan described the culture of Indian education industry as consists of some school learning and an after school learning, where a student goes to school, comes back home, and then goes to a tuition centre or a coaching class. According to him, coaching classes came up as a solution to the problem of school learning. But he said coaching classes themselves are another problem in itself, as they just replicate what school does and don’t really solve for the individual student. So, Zishaan said, Toppr fixes the gaps between school learning and after-school learning with a learning app that is personalized to the students or which personalizes the individual student’s learning journey.
Toppr’s learning app, the company’s marquee service, offers students live classes and sessions to clear doubts, pre-recorded lessons and tests. Its catalogue covers 17 subjects, making the app one-stop after-school learning platform for students across the country. Toppr also helps students prepare for 60 competitive exams like JEE, NEET, CA Foundation, and Olympiads and Scholarship exams like IMO, NTSE, KVPY etc. The startup also recently launched Codr, which provides live one-on-one coding classes to all school-age children across the country.
Zishaan said the fundamental thing that tech does is it makes the journey personalized and one can go after one particular student and build a solution around that student, which is not possible to do in a classroom setting. While we can’t have hundreds of sections for hundreds of different learning needs in a classroom setting, the Toppr CEO reiterated that on the app we can take the learning needs of an individual student and make a solution for that. Zishaan said technology is the only way to do that.
To achieve the above, the Toppr co-founder said it needs a bunch of things to come together, including high-powered computing, internet connection, low-cost data, content to create adaptive, and all the interfaces required to deliver the learning solutions. However, he said it’s possible to do it through technology.
Toppr believes that every student is different and has different learning needs, and they work relentlessly to solve student problems using advanced technology and help them learn better. The company uses state-of-the-art technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Big Data to study student behaviour and create adaptive learning paths, and ensure every student has a unique and personalized learning experience. It also uses Natural Language Processing to solve student doubts.
How AWS helps Toppr scale its personalized learning solutions for school students?
At the heart, Zishaan explained, Toppr is a technology company with a bunch of engineers, product managers and designers who are building learning solutions for its customers, i.e. school students. But any tech company will also have to spend time, energy and money on managing the infra? For that, Zishaan said AWS is a great service that helps them in offloading a bunch of work on the infra side, allowing them to focus on what is core to them – the student. Toppr has been a long-time customer of AWS for all its requirements on the infrastructure side. And according to Zishaan, AWS service allows the company to free up a bunch of its bandwidth to focus on its main goal, which is learning solutions for the students.
Watch the full interview below:
