The Coaching Coaches Classplus has digitized over 1 lakh educators across 3000 cities who are using an app powered by Classplus to teach 25 million students and multiply their earnings 5-6X by reaching out to students beyond their immediate neighborhoods.

By Punita Sabharwal

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Classplus
Bhaswat Agarwal, 30, & Mukul Rustagi, 30, Co-founders, Classplus

After completing his BTech from IIT Roorkee in 2013, Mukul Rustagi joined Futures First as Financial Derivatives Analyst and worked there till late 2015. While Bhaswat Agarwal, his co-founder, graduated from NSIT in 2013 and joined Microsoft after college where he worked as a Technology Strategist. Both quit our jobs and decided to start their own venture in Edtech. Classplus, founded in 2018, empowers academic and non-academic educators through technology by content creation, distribution, and monetization and help them serve their students better. In the age of the internet, educators found themselves devoid of technological tools to give their students a digital learning experience and were not able to compete with the big online players of today. While other edtech giants are using technology to replace them, Classplus enables them through technology by allowing them to adopt a digital teaching model and create a new future for themselves by going national. Classplus allows educators to run all their coaching, communication, assessments, payments, and student engagement activities through a full-stack mobile solution. Besides taking them online, Classplus also enables them to sell their courses online to grow their business outside their localities.

Classplus has digitised over 1 lakh educators across 3000 cities who are using an app powered by Classplus to teach 25 million students and multiply their earnings 5-6X by reaching out to students beyond their immediate neighborhoods. Classplus is the first Indian B2B Edtech platform to have raised 4 rounds of funding of a total of approximately $90 Mn within 2.5 years of launch from global marquee investors like Tiger Global, AWI, RTP Global, Blume Ventures, Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Spiral Ventures, Strive and Times Internet. They raised $65M in a series C round in June 2021. The startup believes in creating long term wealth for its team members and making them stakeholders in the business. "We announced an ESOP buyback program in September, and most recently, a unique referral policy under which we award stock options with a one year vesting schedule, also known as "ReSOPs", to our clan members for every successful referral," adds Rustagi.

Covid 19, wave 1, was a very unique and testing time for Classplus. The lockdown, on 22 March was sudden in nature and it changed overnight the entire way how coaching centers and their offline classes operated. "We started seeing an almost 3-4 surge in our traffic within a week and totally new product requirements from the coaching centers as they started teaching live for the first time in their lives. Maintaining this kind of surge, with an understaffed team of 150 people, who were already battling the pandemic with safety fears required a very transparent, empathetic and mature leadership style. We ended up growing 5x in that quarter and closed two rounds of funding too," shares Rustagi.

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Punita Sabharwal

Entrepreneur Staff

Deputy Editor, Entrepreneur India Magazine

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