OnlineTyari, which helps people prepare for job exams in India, has raised $5 million $750,000*. The startup’s goal is to build its online and mobile platform and add all of the country’s top regional languages over the next year (it is currently available in Hindi and English).
*The previous funding amount was an error due to miscommunication by the company.
Its new investors include 500 Startups, former Infosys chief financial officer Mohandas Pai, Tandem Capital, Eight Capital founding partner Vikram Chachra, and Ixlgo chief executive officer Aloke Bajpai.
Founded in 2014, OnlineTyari offers material, including online tests and e-books, targeted to people who need to pass competitive exams while applying for jobs in civil services, banking, state government, and engineering. The company claims its app has been downloaded over two million times and that it has a daily active user base of 200,000.
OnlineTyari’s co-founder and CEO Vipin Agarwal, notes that India’s education market is currently worth about $20 billion (a figure expected to double by 2017). He tells TechCrunch OnlineTyari’s advantage over traditional test preparation centers and other online services is that it allows users to study in their regional language from their mobile devices.
“All platforms are in English. Moreover, most of the platforms in India are desktop oriented—Online Tyari has been very heavily mobile focused to reach out to the significant Indian population that has leapfrogged desktops and laptops,” he says.
Agarwal adds that OnlineTyari further differentiates from other online test preparation services like Toppr (which recently raised $10 million) and Embibe by partnering with book publishers and content creators to offer the best material.
“OnlineTyari, in effect, complements the business of existing offline education companies, while Toppr and Embibe are trying to compete with them,” says Agarwal.
In a prepared statement, Pai said “With 300 million English-speaking Indians, and double that number with a regional language, the demand for educational content across the language spectrum is tremendous. OnlineTyari is already making a powerful impact with their immediate focus on the over 10 million Indians writing entrance exams for government jobs.”
In addition to its language expansion, OnlineTyari also plans to create algorithms to help users study.