Indian ed-tech market size to touch $2.5 bn this year, says report

The market size of online supplemental education opportunity in India is expected to touch $2.5 billion in 2016 and is poised to grow at 15% over the next three years, driven by innovative ways of delivering courses and study material by players in the space, according a report by research and advisory firm RedSeer Consulting.

"The major drivers for the growth of Indian online supplemental education space will be engaging course material, inventive pedagogy and (attempts by ed-tech firms to) reach out to the distant locations of the country which have minimal supplemental education infrastructure," Mukesh Kumar, associate consultant, RedSeer Consulting, said in a statement.

The report pegs the addressable demographic of online supplemental education in the country at 20 million students studying in classes 6th to 12th. These are the students who would be willing to go online for accessing supplemental education, the report stated.

A large percentage of these students hail from tier 2 and tier 3 cities and are paying for offline tuition classes. Such students are an important market to target for players in the online supplemental education space, it said.

While the business opportunity in smaller cities is large, limited Internet connectivity and reluctance among parents and students to pay for online education hamper adoption of online supplementary education platforms, it said.

Earlier this month, Bangalore- based ed-tech startup Byju's, run by Think & Learn Pvt. Ltd, raised $50 million (Rs 332 crore) in a funding round co-led by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). It marked the first investment of the philanthropic foundation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan in Asia.

VCCircle had exclusively reported in July that Byju's was set to raise up to $50 million from new investors as part of plans to expand outside India.

The funding round comes six months after Byju's, which provides tuition for K-12 students through its app, raised $75 million (about Rs 500 crore) from Sequoia India and Belgian investment firm Sofina. The two rounds make Byju's the most-funded ed-tech startup in India by a wide margin.

In the first week of September, Bangalore-based online test preparation startup TopRankers raised Rs 4.5 crore ($670,000) in angel funding from CareerNet Consulting Pvt. Ltd and Ideation Initiative Pvt. Ltd.

Last year, Mumbai-based test-prep startup Toppr raised funding worth $10 million (around Rs 65 crore) from Fidelity Growth Partners India, SAIF partners and Helion Ventures in May 2015.

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