Blog 14: EnglishHelper
English language learning to empower students in India and abroad
Company: EnglishHelper operates an e-learning platform designed to help people learn English. The company's platform helps users to read and comprehend English, while offering curriculum-based content, as well as offer a tool that analyzes user's writing and suggests corrections of spelling and grammar, sentence construction, phraseology, and word usage, enabling students to improve their English proficiency and develop their vocabulary skills.
HQ Location & Year Founded: Waltham, MA & Gurgaon, India, 2008
Founder: Sanjay Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, is a business leader with over 30 years of experience. He commenced his professional journey in Finance in the early 1980s working across a range of reputed companies in India including the Tata Group, Eicher - Mitsubishi, Pepsi, and Motorola.
Sanjay joined American Express in 1996 and held a number of business leadership roles based in New Delhi, New York, and Singapore. At American Express, Sanjay was responsible for leading, consolidating and restructuring the company’s Global Financial Operations. He headed Customer Service Delivery for global markets outside the USA, and was Chairperson of the company in India.
Sanjay is committed to the need for education to achieve the democratic vision. He writes a blog column for a leading business daily in India, The Economic Times. In addition, Sanjay is engaged with the cause of children and youth, as an active Board Member at Udayan Care, and the School of Inspired Leadership.
Sanjay is also a teacher and coach. He is guest faculty at Duke University’s Executive Education Program. Sanjay also coaches senior executives/ business leaders with special focus on developing personal excellence.
Sanjay is an Advisor to Acumen India and India Leaders for Social Sector.
Funds Raised and VC Investors: $10 million from Innospark, Omidyar Network, and angels
1. Where did the idea for EnglishHelper originate?
Having had an extensive professional career in corporate, , I decided that I wanted to give back by creating an impact-first social enterprise. I felt a strong desire to help improve education, particularly for students who come from the lowest income backgrounds, as this is the only route of poverty. So after more than a decade at Amex in global leadership roles, I decided to come back to India from Singapore to focus on this next chapter. I met Venkat Srinivasan of Innospark, who founded EnglishHelper and together we set out to find the most effective ways of utilizing technology to help students learn. We started to formalize ideas around English language learning initially in India, but we wanted to create a platform that was not limited by boundaries that could be used from anywhere.
2. What is the key problem that EnglishHelper intends to solve?
We are initially focusing on India and other countries with large populations of children who do not receive adequate education. India, for example, is a country with a very young age demographic. There are 260 million kinds in school, of which 70% attend public or “government” schools. Half of these kids who are in grade 5 can’t read at a grade 2 level. This represents a mass of young humanity coming into the world who are not literate or well educated. We chose to focus first on English learning because it is a commonly studied and read language across the country and for historical and professional reasons, it is language that everyone can use but not everyone can handle. We focus on using technology to enhance reading comprehensive in English and are also expanding now into other languages. We will be purposeful as we serve low-income communities at a significant scale.
Back in 2015, we conducted 100,000 independently run tests in partnership with USAID, in which we demonstrated the efficacy and the learning impact of our solution compared with other programs that are commonly used.
3. What is your business model?
We make money through a freemium model. Our app is often free to schools for a period before we sign contracts. We maintain a low-cost base to stay nimble. Most of our 80 people work on product, technology, and analytics. Last year made enough revenue to cover our costs.
With schools now reopening after Covid, government schools are expected to have more money to spend on improving their tools. We expect to go from 3X to 5X in revenue in 2022, while our costs will remain almost flat.
4. What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?
Having been at this now for 10 years, we serve roughly 10% of the 1.2 million government schools across every region of India. By the end of 2022, we will be working with 150-200,000 schools. This covers over 30 million students. Of these, we expect nearly 5 million students to be actively using our app, which was just launched during the pandemic.
We can now reach students at home at a massive scale. We have 100,000 teacher downloads who use our dashboard. We connect the school, classroom, teacher, and student.
They keys to our success are:
a. We integrate with the curriculum i.e. do not add new or more for teachers or students; we simply make students learn more effectively.
b. Teachers play a pivotal role – in class and as influencers for study at home.
c. We close the learning loop i.e. class learning is supplemented by self-study at home assisted by our platform leading to enhanced outcomes.
5. What lies ahead in the product plans for EnglishHelper?
We are expanding on several fronts. We will start offering complementary learning products. In addition to English, we are prototyping with Hindi. We will support India’s focus on foundational literacy. We don’t try to change the curriculum, however how our app trains itself to read school textbooks in order to augment the classroom lessons. We are adding new capabilities that will enable students to learn using any content as well as provide personalized guidance to each learner.
EnglishHelper is beginning to reach outside of India to Sri Lanka, where we are targeting implementation in all 10,000 schools of the country. We also have a small footprint in Africa, as well as in Central America and Mongolia.
6. What are the long-term strategic growth objectives?
We plan to move our English learning tools beyond reading comprehension and into understanding concepts. We will be further integrating functionality to bring learners and teachers closer. This will enhance the post-class at-home learning experience.
Our longer-term plans are include adding languages beyond English, as well as science, history, and other disciplines. We see geographic expansion opportunities in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We eventually also want to bring our app to the Americas, including the US.
Ron’s Take
Foundational literacy is the most critical building block to education and successful lifelong learning. Without this, those struggling in poverty have very little chance of finding opportunities to break the economic chains and professional barriers that are holding them back. With widespread adoption of phones, even in the poorest corners of the world, the opportunity exists to provide tools that will help children from falling so far behind that they may never catch up. EnglishHelper has made astonishing progress in getting into schools and in use with teachers and students in India as a supplement to the classroom experience. With continued aggressive growth and expansion into other subject matters as well as new markets, the impact that Sanjay and his team will have will be substantial and disruptive to the low expectations that fuel the vicious cycles of poverty and illiteracy.