Edtech Platform Questt Raises $1.35 Mn In A Seed Round Led By Chiratae Ventures The investment will enable the company to increase its user base and add more features to its app and hire talent

Homegrown edtech startup Questt on Thursday announced that it has raised around $1.35 million in a Seed round funding led by Chiratae Ventures. AET Fund and entrepreneurs including Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal, Pranay Gupta, Ramakant Sahrama, First Cheque, and Razorpay also participated in the round.

The amount raised will enable the platform to increase its user base and add more features to its app. The investment will also be used to hire talent.

"All over the world, teachers invest a huge amount of time in creating and evaluating answer-sheets. The output of this process is a score/grade for a student that has no real insights. These processes that do not factor in the advancements in tech that have happened over the last decade need to be reinvented. The current system asks teachers and students to invest a huge amount of time without yielding significant output and this is what we are trying to solve at Questt. We are building an education data stack to empower teachers with deep insights that allow for a more customized and effective learning experience. With the new investors coming on board, we are excited to grow under their mentorship and guidance," said Akhil Singh, Mohsin, and Rohit Pande, founders, Questt, collectively in a statement.

Beyond the immediate impact of optimizing homework for teachers and learners, the company is on a mission of building an education data stack that empowers the ecosystem as a whole making learning more value-driven and data-rich.

Realizing the potential of technology in supporting teachers and students in their academic journey, the company has been said to have built a product that automates homework assessment for teachers, saving 90 per cent of their time.

For students, it claims to gamify the mundane tasks of solving homework questions and in the process records thousands of data points.

"Questt is targeting the multi-billion-dollar edtech industry with its unique offering for students and teachers by introducing tech innovation to make learning and education more meaningful in the post-pandemic world...Akhil and the team has built a fabulous product with an easy-to-use interface allowing access to educators and learners pan-India. We are looking forward to seeing the team grow and achieve great things in the near future," shared Venkatesh Peddi, partner, Chiratae Ventures.

The ongoing global pandemic has changed the landscape of edtech in India. The restriction in physical spaces and in-person interactions has forced teachers to adopt new ways of assigning and evaluating homework to track the current progress of their student's learning. This is where Questt comes in, as a platform that helps both teachers and students to make the technology while educating and learning remotely in the most seamless and user-friendly way.

Over 40 schools in the country are using the platform, and within 50 days of the launch, over 1 million questions have been answered on the platform. With the platform, the homework is assessed and mapped with 6 parameters like concepts, cognitive abilities, skills, and others, leading to a more customized insight-driven learning for each learner. The company strives to uplift the digital learning experience for the ecosystem as a whole by leveraging data sciences and advancements in tech, a statement shared by the platform said.

"AET Fund is committed to collaborating with businesses that tap into tech and multimedia to solve unique need-gaps for the emerging mobile-first consumer behavior in India. Our investment in Questt is one of the great examples of that. We are delighted to partner with the Questt team in their journey to make teachers' and students' life more productive and insight-driven," added Yuki Kawamura, partner, AET Fund.

During the pandemic, most teachers adopted WhatsApp to conduct homework. Once students uploaded photos of their answers, the teachers would download each image separately, check the answers using photo editing software, and upload every student's answer sheet back on WhatsApp but the process of assigning homework on the platform takes less than 10 seconds and over 80 per cent of the questions are auto evaluated on the app, the company further said.

Unlike conducting classes or exams, homework will remain online in a post-COVID world. USA and China have already carved a big market for powerful assessment tools and data-driven processes. Companies like US-based Kahoot and China-based 17zuoye have millions of users and are both unicorns. The next three years will witness the creation and growth of this category in India.