Teachmint pivots to focus solely on digitizing schools

Edtech startup Teachmint, known for its software infrastructure to help teachers and educators digitize their classrooms, is now eyeing a bigger chunk of the education pie by offering their software to help digitize schools.

The pandemic offered wings to edtech companies as their usage skyrocketed with schools, colleges and other physical institutions closed. Lightspeed-backed Teachmint was one of them, which grew at a scorching pace in 2021 by taking tutors and coaching institutes online.

Its flagship products Free Teachmint and Teachmore witnessed quick adoption during the lockdown and restrictions. But despite two apps growing well until the first half of 2022, this wasn’t translating into sustainable revenue streams, according to sources. Owing to this, the company identified a bigger opportunity in powering schools.

At the end of FY22, team Teachmint was all set for a pivot.

“We realised that we could make a large(r) dent by offering softwares to schools,” Mihir Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of the three-year-old firm, told Entrackr.

But he refrains from calling this move a pivot. “It [powering schools] was a natural extension of what we started,” he added.

Last year, Teachmint discontinued its course-selling offering Teachmore, which they acquired in December 2021. “We want to focus all our energy on institutionalized school offerings and decided to pull the plug from Teachmore,” said Gupta.

Teachmint started offering an integrated school platform early last year which gives full stack solutions including teaching management, fee, classroom and admission management, student information system, report card among others.

With its new focus, it appears that Teachmint directly competes with Lead School. To some extent, Lead’s offerings overlap with the Gupta-led firm but the former’s core competence lies in curriculum design.

According to Gupta, Teachmint’s vertical SaaS school offering has reached out to over a million students. “It’s being used by a few thousand schools out of which 80% schools are Indian and rest from global markets [primarily, MENA and SEA regions],” added Gupta.

Teachmint remained a pre-revenue stage company until FY22 and has only started monetising in the ongoing fiscal year. Its losses widened 25X to Rs 131 crore while its operating collection stood at Rs 80 lakh.

“Our revenue wheel has picked up pace and we will post sizable revenue in FY23 as well as FY24,” said Gupta.

Teachmint has raised a little over $100 million in total funding, including a $78 million worth Series B round in October 2021. According to Fintrackr, it was last valued at around $500 million.

While edtech posterboys Byju’s and Unacademy have been laying off employees as follow-on funding looks very difficult, Teachmint isn’t worried. “We have enough money and our burn is low as we cater to the B2B audience,” said Gupta.

Teachmint’s focus on education infrastructure as it calls the overall thrust of what it does certainly taps into a real market, as education evolves to a new paradigm. However, as the firm has discovered, pricing its services is another ball game altogether, when compared to acquiring users. While it does seem to have the reserves to last for a long time, the firm will need to deliver on the promise of finding customers willing to pay, and pay fairly for its services, if it wants to keep the funding tap on. The journey ahead promises to be full of lessons that could define not just Teachmint’s future, but many other edtechs in the space.