NEW DELHI: Rohit Jain, founder and CEO, uFaber, recently joined NewsX for an exclusive conversation as part of NewsX India A-List. uFaber is one of the fastest-growing edutech companies in India, specialising in personalised training with the latest technologies and high-quality content. Spearheaded by IITians with over 10 years of experience in education, uFaber has one of the largest course catalogues across languages, entrance exams, and skill enhancement subjects.
Talking about his journey with uFaber, Rohit said, “uFaber started in 2014 and since then it has been like a roller coaster journey. From a two people-led team back in 2014 to now being almost 2000+ people team, uFaber is growing at almost 2x and 3x every year. We are glad to contribute to the growth of the industry and sector by making numerous people learn online from home without any constraint of time and location. Also, partnering with a lot of people, having an amazing team, giving the opportunity to a lot of women, who work from home, become a part of our trailer community. So, it’s been an amazing journey so far.”
He added, “The pandemic has contributed a lot to the surge in the industry. So, that is one reason. The second reason is that some players are getting very aggressive and a lot of funding is coming into this space so that is opening up a market, giving more awareness to the parents, especially in K12 space where people were very limited when it comes to sending the school’s students to their schools, or kids to their schools. But because of the pandemic the schools were not available, and there were these several options available outside of school. That has suddenly given exposure to the parents and it is visible in the numbers also. At the same time, online education has been around for a while now. It was growing at a little lesser growth rate but now people have started seeing a lot of its benefits. The pedagogy, internet speed and content quality have improved. People are seeing that online is as good as or maybe in some cases better than offline. That is why more and more people are shifting to it.”
When asked about the kind of educational courses offered by uFaber, Rohit responded, “uFaber is not sector-specific. We are not limited to K12, entrance exams or any such space. Our USP is personalised education. We offer a personal tutor, a personal trainer for every student and whenever we see that there is a learning requirement, there are a good number of students who want to learn that particular subject and we provide personalised courses for that. Currently, we offer programs for entrance exams like UPSC, teacher training programs, and courses for school students like programming, communication, and robotics. It is a diversified portfolio ranging from school to college to post-college and working professionals.”
Speaking about the increasing competition in the market, he said, “Education as an industry is not like typical e-commerce or travel industry where everything is digitised and people are just becoming a marketplace and selling the same thing. Though there are many players, everybody is selling different stuff. Even in the same space such as in K12, there are many players but everybody has a different product, a different USP and a different program to offer to the parents. We are keeping us differentiated and liked by a lot of students and parents as we focus a lot on personalisation. We are not taking away the role of the teacher which is essential for education. We all have learned from teachers and have liked some of them in our learning experience in school or college. A teacher plays an important role in the education of the child no matter what content or technology you have. Hence, we focus a lot on the teacher quality. Along with the teacher, we provide you with good quality content, assessment, technology and all those things. One of the things that we really emphasise on and are proud of is very good quality of teachers which is very limited in offline space and other offerings as providing a personal tutor at a large scale with better quality is not easy. That is a big problem and that is where we are focused on.”
Commenting on effectiveness of government policies, he said, “Government is already doing well in terms of supporting startups and coming up with policies in education like the NEP. As far as the government support is concerned, it is quite good. There is nothing specific that this particular industry needs from the government because there is a lot already. Rather the industry, especially the private industry, exists because of the inefficiency in the government system, especially in education. Had the public schools been really good, and had colleges been very good, there would be no need for any private players in applications.”
Sharing his vision for uFaber, Rohit said “We want to become a leading player in the personalised education space and our growth depends on our number of trainers and programmes. We are planning to grow about 5x and by 2025, we would reach a milestone that we plan to have. The growth is both horizontal as well as vertical. Currently, we have five different offerings and want to extend that to about 10-12 offerings, more skills, and expand our trainer base. Currently, we have about 2000 plus teachers from all parts of the country and want to increase it to about 10,000-15,000 trainers in the next couple of years.”