Affordable quality education

In this ever evolving education sector, Biglaksh added quality digital class room solution. Mukul Dhall, director gives a lowdown on how it can help schools and children in general.

SS: Tell me about yourself, what was your previous profession and how did you think of coming into this business?

MD: I am a computer science engineer from Delhi college of engineering. I was working as a software engineer in Adobe India. The whole idea to start working in the e-Learning domain is to provide quality education to the children from best of the teachers at a fraction of the cost at which it is available now.

SS: What role did your family play in terms of supporting you?

MD: My family supported my business plan and funded the company in the initial phases.

SS: What is your company's full name and what is your product range?

MD: The company's full name is BigLaksh Education Pvt. Ltd. As a company we are fully focused towards the e-Learning domain. We have a digital classroom solution under the brand name of SmartSchool. The solution is known for the quality and the innovation we have put to develop the education content and assessment modules. Having a repository of around 15,000 modules we are one of the largest repository of e-Learning content designed according to the CBSE curriculum following Indian pedagogy techniques. We have a unique "Ask a doubt" solution which is based on artificial intelligence which can answer the doubts of the students with a huge database of information. We also have a full featured "Online teaching" solution. We also have a host of e-Learning applications which we provide along with our e-Learning content for taking the learning to the next horizon. Our content and application are also ported for the mobile and tablet environments like we have our content fully supported for Android, Blackberry and iPhone devices.

SS: How did you fund the business initially?

MD: Initially we fund the business using our personal money.

SS: What challenges did you face in establishing your business?

MD: When we started in 2007, the market for e-Learning in the consumer space was pretty new. It was a challenge creating a good development and marketing team. Being a company where innovation through technology forms the core DNA of the company, hiring best of people of the industry and keeping them motivated was the biggest challenge.

SS: What is your team size and what challenges did you face in putting your team together, how was the experience of hiring the first employees?

MD: With a strong workforce of around 110 professionals ranging from animators, software professionals, to education experts, BigLaksh is one of the brightest emerging e-Learning company in India.

SS: What is your product's USP?

MD: Innovation through technology forms the core DNA of the company. Our USP is the quality of the content. We have extremely strong software solution to package our 3D content. We have a unique "Ask a doubt" solution which is based on artificial intelligence which can answer the doubts of the students with a huge database of information. We are the only Indian company having our solution fully developed for the mobile environments like we have the applications to play our content on Android, Blackberry and iPhone devices.

SS:  What is your marketing strategy?

MD: We will have a mixed strategy to have our own sales team along with channel partners. Even though our solution is best in the industry we are keeping our solutions as affordable as possible.

SS: How are you planning to scale up your business?

MD: We might look forward to get second round of funding if required for scaling up our business.

SS: What is the price range?

MD: With our solution, a school can start with SmartSchool concept by spending just Rs 65,000 per classroom.

SS:  What is your turnover like?

MD: We are expecting to have a annual turnover of around 50 crores by the end of this year.

SS: Where do you see your products 5 years from now?

MD: With our consumer product we would like to raise the standard of education. With our artificial intelligence systems we would like to create a software solution which can simulate the presence of a teacher. We believe we can reduce the cost of education by at least one fifth of what is being spent nowadays. We would also like to start pitching our solutions globally.