Advitiya Sharma, co-founder of the real estate portal Housing has launched his next venture called “Genius Micro Schools”. The new startup focuses on the education technology sector for students from kindergarten to class eight
“We’re going to work with Entrepreneur Teachers, help them run “Genius Micro Schools” at home,” said Sharma. “We’ve designed a technology that can customise itself for learning needs, interest and pace of every child,” he said.
When most of the education startups are student-centric in India, Sharma’s new application seems to be more teacher-centric. As per the website the startup will be providing a flexible coaching session for students at the teacher’s residence and take a cut from the fee.
It calls each centre where a teacher takes classes a “micro school,” (and not a tuition class)—terminology inspired by AltSchool, a Silicon Valley-based non-traditional school chain that raised $100 million last year.
“Scale won’t be a problem because when we acquire a teacher, we also acquire their real estate. This is a very asset-light model. We’ve also done affordability analysis and are targeting neighbourhoods where teachers are likely to have tablet devices,” said Sharma.
With Byju’s, which offers learning programmes for Class VI to XII students and preparation programmes for competitive exams raising $75 million in March, Ed-tech startup in India have taken pace this year.
Genius will run micro schools with about 5-8 students and the institutes will be aggregated and hyperlocal in nature. The company will also separately train teachers to utilise technology and optimise for the time.
Born in Jammu in a family of doctors, Sharma was one of the 12 co-Founders of Housing.com and quitted in March this year to start on his own.
Leave a Reply