Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is very interesting. The way you’ve stepped through the line of thinking of why you’ve arrived at these decisions is very instructive. Where are your schools?

Pallav Pandey: All over India. These schools are very different from typical SME clusters. SME clusters are very local. That is not how schools are. Schools are evenly distributed across India. The only way you can go and cover schools is if you figure out a telephonic way to reach out.

Sramana Mitra: Definitely.

Pallav Pandey: You cannot have feet on the street.

Sramana Mitra: And not at those price points.

Pallav Pandey: Our entry point is free. We don’t even make money from day one. We’ll make money eventually. Schools are not the ones who do it on a self-serve basis. We created a telesales team. They reach out to schools and do a demo. Once they’re in the system, we start introducing our coding program or English program. Coding program is very interesting actually. It’s similar to Whitehat Jr, which was acquired by Byju’s. They charge 800 rupees (~$10) for teaching coding.

We charge people $10 for the whole year of learning coding. The schools that are running this program are going crazy. Everybody wants to learn coding. They already have the teachers, but they don’t have a platform where children can come and make programs. That is what we give them. At these price points, it’s magical. Schools are making money. We are making money. Parents are able to get their children the best available at cheap prices.

Sramana Mitra: Fabulous. This go-to-market that you have, what is your forecast? You have four million students now. What do you think is going to be the growth rate?

Pallav Pandey: We are adding 400 schools a month. We are sitting at 11,000 schools now. The plan is to get to 50,000 schools. We only work with private schools. We leave the masses and the top of the pyramid. That leaves us with 160,000 schools. That is about 66 million students. Of that, we are currently sitting with 4 million students and 11,000 schools. If all goes as per plan, we can get one-third of this market. Maybe we’ll end up with 50,000 schools and 20 million kids. With that, we should be able to monetize to about $150 million.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. What about funding? You had the $3 million from Blume.

Pallav Pandey: We raised more. We raised a Series A round of about $22 million. It was led by Winter Capital.

Sramana Mitra: You and your brother are both doing this now?

Pallav Pandey: One of us is full-time.

Sramana Mitra: How was working with your brother?

Pallav Pandey: Pretty good. It’s good between me and him. We are complementary with our own makeup and have a lot of mutual respect.

Sramana Mitra: Very happy to hear. My father did a startup with his brother. It was a disaster. They owned eight ships. My father wanted to take it public and my uncle didn’t. They had to split up.

Pallav Pandey: Working with family can be tricky. Also, you have to work extra hard so that people don’t feel like it’s a family business. When you’re attracting talent, you have to be mindful that these brothers have all the say.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right. In India, there is this tendency of nepotism. It’s a nepotism culture. You have to rise above that when you have family involved. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo
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