Avagmah brings prominent University courses on mobile for students, working professionals

Over the years, we’ve moved significantly from learning to e-learning. Today, there are many edu-tech start-ups working at awareness and expanding the reach of the sector, and adding to the increasing number is  Avagmah. The Avagmah platform  enables universities to help their students and working professionals acquire an MBA degree through a mobile app by providing its platform – an amalgamation of cloud-based SaaS technology. “Avagmah’s platform assists universities with app and web technology solutions for delivery of courses. It helps universities manage marketing, student counselling, virtual classroom, student engagement and retention,” co-founder Karthik KS tells us. The startup has helped enrol 3,651 students so far, for courses like MBA, BBA and other post-graduate degrees like those in finance and human resources. The universities include Pondicherry University, Los-Angeles-based UCLA Extension, Bharatidasan University and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, among others. Karthik said that 52 percent of those enrolled on the Avagmah platform are from tier 2 & 3 cities. Avagmah was founded in 2013 by Karthik KS, Sankar Bora and Prasad Palla. Karthik completed engineering from NIT Kurukshetra and Management from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi. Sankar Bora has a B Tech degree from NIT Kozhikode and was the co-founder of Myntra. Palla has completed Mtech from IIT Kanpur and MBA from IIM Bangalore . Startups in India follow successful US business models, and Avagmah is no different. It emulates academicpartnerships.com, but is working in a larger market and at lower costs. It was formed in the bid to help working professionals who aspire for mid-career correction or career enhancements by pursuing long term higher education. “The idea is to help working professionals earn quality higher education online so that they do not have to leave their jobs or take sabbaticals for higher studies,” Karthik added. Avagmah is a team of 63 employees across Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Los Angeles. The company now plans pan-India presence by partnering with top notch universities across the nation. It recently received funding from Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder and former CEO & MD of Infosys and Atul Nishar, founder of Hexaware and Aptech Computer Education. In the past, it has raised $5million dollars. Talking about the edu-tech sector in India, Karthik said, “The Indian education sector is still warming up to the concept of using technology for education. As an eco-system enabler we feel the biggest challenge we come across is to drive the adoption of technology in many academic institutions and make them understand the value they could derive from it. Although as consumers Indians have become technology driven, applying tech to seek education is gradually catching up. With the stark gap in availability of quality education and hunger for same, it won’t be too long by when most Institutes would be on tech Platforms like ours.”