Camp K12 aims to change the way traditional education is delivered globally

Sometimes the ecosystem that surrounds you plays a defining role in shaping you. In the case of Anshul Bhagi, the ecosystem and the stars seemed to align to ensure that he converted his dream into a reality and became the founder of Camp K12 at the age of 22.

Bhagi’s family had moved from India and he was studying at a public school in California when he discovered his love for coding: creating, innovating and setting harder and harder problems to resolve through gaming became a passion for him early in life. At 12, he’d set up his own website and was spending four to five hours everyday outside his school curriculum doing stuff he loved and that came to him naturally: making Mario jump higher or avoid a stumbling block by rejigging the codes. 

Where Bhagi got lucky was that his ecosystem - parents, teachers, peers and the school as a whole - encouraged his increasingly time consuming preoccupation instead of stifling it. In a typical Indian setting, he’d be told to stop fooling around and focus on his academic pursuits. Learn math and physics the way every other student did.

Instead, his teachers asked him to up his game and make his codes more challenging every time he came up with something new, his parents didn’t reprimand him to concentrate on his studies. He even came up with a code that combined Western and Indian classical notations much to his mother’s delight, something she could put to use. In school he quickly became the president of the coding club and society at 14 and regularly invited Silicon valley tech experts and innovators - including “Dr Java” James Gosling - to come and speak to them., exposing the students to be best in the business at a very early stage, a club he led for four years.

Post school, his success in coding and his passion for the subject secured him a seat in many Ivy League schools in the US, of which he picked MIT for his graduate studies in 2007 to study computer science at MIT. Entry to MIT opened many windows to the world outside as the young student managed to go teach what he loved best in Brazil, Italy,  Kenya, India, China, Indonesia and at schools in the US itself, giving him an invaluable peek into each country’s education systems, its strengths and limitations and students aspirations.

Anshul Bhagi, Founder, Camp K12 with his teammates from Code@HBS

It was around this time that Bhagi reached a few conclusions. The K12 system across countries was trying to teach similar things in similar ways and very little had changed over the years. This explained why the system failed to hold the interest or find resonance with many. There was a larger global problem with K12 curriculum, pedagogy and delivery.  

On the other hand, he could also see the adoption of Internet growing globally, he could see the shift in parental mindsets - where they could now appreciate the value of skills that go beyond the school curriculums and understood that the old linear approach was not the only option - and the new gig economy would allow the spurting of new models in education : more interactive, more personalised and more fun. The Internet, the gig economy and shifts in parent mindsets would make possible a new pedagogy and curriculum, one more suited to the 21st and 22nd centuries.

In his third year at MIT, Bhagi made a  trip to India in 2010 where he ended up teaching a bunch of ninth grade students at DPS, RK Puram - which had a pretty advanced and gifted set of kids already - how to build games. He quickly built a science and math based gaming class which he taught for the summer where the students learnt how to build new games in a more professional and structured manner. “The kids were thrilled to see a different pedagogy and curriculum. The same concepts that they had to learn but in a more exciting, fun way”, explains Bhagi. It was a game changer for the students as they saw and tasted the possibilities of what could be. It was also a seminal moment for Camp K12, the venture Bhagi set up in college and has refined over time. 

From 2010 till 2018, Camp K12 was offline, mostly with Bhagi as the main teacher. In 2015, he also added an MBA from Harvard (2015-17) to his own education journey while he continued to hold similar coding and gaming classes  at many progessive schools, mostly in Delhi and Mumbai. At Harvard, he co-founded and was the co-president of a coding club at Harvard University. The club called Code@HBS was initially built for MBA students at Harvard (the premise being you can't be a business leader in today's world without understanding the language of technology) but it was soon opened up to all graduate schools of Harvard given its popular demand and appeal.

Even as he interned with Apple, Google and worked with Mckinsey, Bhagi continued to hold camps at schools across India, getting a flavour and insight into what students want and what they could create when the right buttons were pushed. It was this that gave him a far deeper understanding into Indian students and their parents aspirations, desires and inclinations.

From 2010-2018, he’d done offline camps for kids across K-12. By 2014-15, Bhagi began to see how companies like Vedantu, Toppr and others were trying to fill in all the gaps in India’s sputtering education system at different levels and across segments. He’d always known Camp K12 needed to have a strong online presence but now he felt the time was ripe. So, in 2018, Bhagi moved to India bag and baggage and started to work on how he could deliver the same pedagogy and quality that he’d managed to deliver offline online. “Almost everybody replaces the teacher with a pre-recorded video”, he realised as he studies model after model of ed-tech firms. He felt that while there was a significant opportunity to deliver quality education over the Internet, it needed a very different technology stack. So Bhagi spent 2015-2017 building the technology on which Camp K12 runs while at Harvard. He was joined by a co-founder who was a former country head at Apple in India - Sandeep Bhagi.

Camp K12 targets children in the age group 6 to 18 globally. In coding alone, the global market size he estimates at around 200 million kids. In March 2020, Camp K12 raised $4 million in a seed round with Matrix Partners and SAIF Partners (now rebranded as Elevation Capital) and it has grown 120X in revenue since the last fundraise in March 2020, and taught over 200,000 students across the globe with the largest chunk in India. Currently, with 250 employees,  it is expanding in new geographies (US and other markets), adding group classes to lower price points and into new categories (beyond coding). Although coding is the first bastion, it aims to be a “household name in 21st century skills” for children around the world but it remains distinct as it is not in the CBSE. ICSE or any existing education curriculum space occupied by players like Byju’s in India. “I think skills beyond the school curriculum will become more significant and that’s what we are going after”, explains Bhagi. 

He may be going after this but he’s not alone. Companies like WhiteHat Jr. and others have an early mover advantage and the space is extremely crowded with many players like PurpleTutor, MindChamp and others. “I am not worried either about the existing players or other me-too’s since each entrepreneur’s eventual offering is a sum total of his or her own life journey and experiences and hence not easily replicable” he argues. 

But replicable or not, finally in any crowded space, it will be the end product that is the decider. The proof of the pudding will lie in the eating.