Clear your doubts in mathematics instantly with this ed-tech start-up

Many students in India take tuition classes after school, yet their doubts aren't solved effectively. Homework is another area where they need help.  

To help students facing these two problems, Tanushree Nagori and Aditya Shankar, both IIT-Delhi alumni, who were running a brick and mortar coaching institute, co-founded DoubtNut, an automated doubt clearing platform in 2016.

The Gurugram-based ed-tech company has raised $3.3 million in a Pre-Series A round led by Surge, an initiative by Sequoia India, with participation from existing investors WaterBridge Ventures and  Omidyar Network India. AET, Japan also participated in the round as a new investor.

“Tanushree’s and Aditya’s insights came from their own experience where despite great teaching, they were not able to cater for all individual doubts without turning to technology. Their passion led them to launch the app in 12 vernacular languages in a really short time and creating relevant learning journeys for the next half billion users,” says Namita Dalmia, principal, investments, Omidyar Network India.

The start-up helps students from Classes VI to XII and those taking IIT-JEE to solve their math problems. A student takes a photograph of the problem and uploads it on the company’s app and gets a video explaining the solution in two seconds. 

“DoubtNut is a comprehensive learning app that features a simple user interface in multiple local Indian languages. It uses complex AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning to serve up answers and video lessons in response to photos of specific problems,” says Nagori, the co-founder.

She says most similar platforms focus on only explaining concepts rather than clearing a specific doubt or helping with homework. 

The company claims that the platform is made keeping students from tier II and III cities and beyond in mind and therefore, its videos are not in English but rather in conversational “Hinglish”; 93 per cent of the DoubtNut users are not from six major cities. 

According to the Google-KPMG report on online education, the size of the online education market in 2021 is expected to be $1.96 billion.  As a part of its expansion, the company plans to add more subjects such as physics, chemistry and English to its platform.

At present, nine million questions are answered monthly on an average on the company’s platform. DoubtNut aims at solving 90 million questions per month by December 2019. About 3.5 million students are using the company’s platform every month and it targets to increase the number to 17.5 million by the end of this year. “At the moment, we have decided not to charge users, and we will review that periodically,” Nagori says.

The company will use the fresh capital to deepen and widen its product offerings in terms of subjects, languages and classes and expand its team.