5 Education Technology (EdTech) Startups That Aim to Make Learning Become More Inclusive and Efficient
1 May 2019
Education is important because it is the key to gaining the knowledge, tools and skills for the best opportunity of success in life. However, in many cases; access to education is uneven and creates disparity of learning opportunity between one person to another.
The emergence of technology has also improved knowledge quality by providing access to educational content.
Education Technology (EdTech) refers to an area of technology devoted to the development and application of tools (including software, hardware, and processes) intended to promote education. Startups and tech companies operating in this sector have introduced various ways to make education process become more accessible, efficient, and beneficial for all stakeholders.
Because of the importance of education, East Ventures has been investing in this sector since 2014. Until now, we already have 5 portfolios that came from three countries all over the world.
Ruangguru
Ruangguru is an online platform focusing on enabling access to quality teachers and content. It is by far the largest marketplace for private tutoring in Indonesia – connecting more than 6 million prospective students with over 150,000 private tutors who are available to assist students to learn particular skills/ knowledge and to get additional support outside school/campus.
A year after it was founded in 2014, it expanded its services by providing an online test-preparation platform – known as RuangUji, which enables students to access thousands of question banks and data analytics to help them better understand their learning status and progress. At the beginning of 2016, it launched an on-demand mobile application that connects students with teachers to solve difficult questions instantly in real time through their mobile phone.
Launched in 2017, ruangbelajar is one of Ruangguru’s main products right now. It is an online self-learning platform with topic-based learning journeys consisting of videos, quizzes, infographics, topic exercises, and notes that is accessible through the mobile app. It is available for all subjects and all grades within the Indonesian K12 curriculum.
Quintal
Quintal is an academic portal which integrates the functionalities of Learning Management System (Academic) and Student Information System (Administrative) to serve Indonesian schools, catering National and SPK (previously known as national plus and international) schools. It serves as a data-sharing and communication platform between a school and its teachers, students and parents. Each of its users has unique features based on their role, and able to share data and communicate among one another.
Koobits
Koobits is an online learning portal that develops children’s problem solving skills by combining curriculum-based assessment questions with social gaming elements, making it cool to know the answers and score good grades. To date, over 160,000 assessment books have been completed on the KooBits EDU portal.
It also has KooBits Editor, a story writing platform that nurtures your child’s creativity and communication skills. In addition to creating and sharing their own animated ebooks, members can read, vote, and comment on the best stories – inspiring a digital community of active readers and writers.
Creatubbles
Creatubbles is the safe global community for creators of all ages. It is the perfect space for children, families and teachers to save, share, discover and interact with multimedia creativity portfolios. It lets anyone share their experiences and creations safely in more than 50 countries, whether they are at home, school, an event or activity.
The difference between Creatubbles and other creativity platform is how it reviewed and approved every creation in its platform before being published. It also blocked profanities in 15 languages, and reviewed all comments before becoming publicly available.
Waygo
Waygo is a real-time computer vision platform on mobile devices. Its first product is a suite of translation apps. Using optical character recognition (OCR), your phone camera can be used to instantly translate text without an internet connection, tackling the language barriers that can hold you back during a business or leisure trip in a foreign country.
The first Waygo app is for Chinese to English translation and is available in the app store. It has patent-pending technology and will add more languages in the near future.