Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does the teacher handle so many grades?

Manan Khurma: The teacher handles the students either in a one-to-one class or she does a small group of students. Typically, our teachers will opt for a certain grade segment. Even in a group class, the teacher is essentially teaching one-on-one. Let’s say a teacher has four students in a group at that same hour. Each student would work on their own material. The teacher would hop on from student to student.

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You had to develop a new methodology of online learning that would capture some of the nuances of your physical learning and translate that into a methodology that would work online.

Manan Khurma: Not some nuances, but all nuances. Lots of custom development work had to be done. It took us two years to get that right. By the end of 2019, we were in a situation where the online platform was working pretty well. We hired a few hundred students to learn online with us. Our offline student back then was really large – about 40,000 students. Our online was still nascent.

Building a Global HR Tech Business from India: Adit Jain, CEO of Leena AI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2020, the product was still that full workflow HR solution?

Adit Jain: We have added two more products in 2020. When Covid hit, a lot of organizations came to us and said, “Leena is doing HR service delivery, but can Leena proactively go to employees and do pulse checks?” I don’t know how familiar you are with the entire employee engagement gamut. They said, “Employees love Leena. Why can’t Leena go to employees and ask questions?” It was in the making in late 2019, but it got a great boost in 2020. Now onboarding is completely digital.

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The $4 million round got you the teacher scaling process. In that advertising process, what did you learn? What were you advertising for?

Manan Khurma: We were looking for women. That was the initial set that worked for us. At that point, our teacher base was almost entirely women. Because we were home-based learning centers, we were looking for individuals who had some degree of stability. We were essentially looking for married women. If they had kids of their own, that was an added bonus.

Building a Global HR Tech Business from India: Adit Jain, CEO of Leena AI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the 2018 timeframe when you were ending the year with 20 customers in that HR use case. What happens in 2019? Help me understand how your HR business is growing and what is the next use case that you go after.

Adit Jain: We wanted to focus on HR. We didn’t want to go out of HR right now. In 2019, we started talking to customers globally. We are in the business of providing a great experience to the end-users who, without Leena AI, would have called or emailed someone and waited for a response. The second biggest ROI is that we save a lot of HR time. On the other end of the table is an HR who gets the same request 500 times a day. They’re bored and have better things to do.

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How were the teachers acquiring students from the neighborhood?

Manan Khurma: Mostly the teachers were relying on their personal networks.

Sramana Mitra: Word-of-mouth.

Manan Khurma: Yes, or you go to your complex and do an event. It was mostly organic stuff. This is how we grew on the demand side for the first few years. We now spent money for acquiring demand. We were getting teachers on board and they were getting students on board.

Building a Global HR Tech Business from India: Adit Jain, CEO of Leena AI (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise money through the YC process?

Adit Jain: Yes. We raised a $2 million seed round from Elad Gil. Then a bunch of seed funds joined in. Funder’s Club was one of them.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you locate the company?

Adit Jain: I shifted to New York because we were getting a lot of manufacturing customers who were based on the East Coast than on the West Coast. We have a huge presence in India as well for development and product.

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the sweet sauce of your curriculum? In the market, we have Khan Academy. There’s a lot of curriculum out there. What is it that you bring to the table in your methodology that is different?

Manan Khurma: The biggest underlying trait is what we call learning by reasoning, which is understanding the why behind the what. Every fact and algorithm that the student is expected to learn, they also need to understand the why behind it. For example, if they’re in grade four and they’re being taught how to add fractions, they also clearly need to understand why their algorithm works. They also need to learn why it’s true.