5 Lessons from the Social Impact Startup that we couldn’t resist investing in

Eckovation was founded by two IIT Delhi alumni Ritesh Singh and Akshat Goel in 2014. They envisaged a virtual learning platform which would cater to the students seeking the smart education with limited resources.

The low hanging fruit was providing smart classes on mobile devices anticipating a large penetration in sync with India’s growing mobile & internet adoption.

So they came up with a social learning platform which made educators deliver the desirable smart education with ease to their students. The mobile app allowed teachers to send notifications to student groups, coaching institutes and universities.

As they proceeded further, the abilities to share notes, course contents and extracurricular interests were added to the app. Starting from ground zero, their social learning platform acquired over a million users in a short duration.

The app metrics revealed the user stickiness and high degree of engagement.

Eckovation Solutions pvt ltd is based out of Delhi NCR region and had raised their seed funding from Chandigarh Angels Network (CAN). This was CAN’s first angel investment in India since its incorporation. Eckovation deployed the funds in the team expansion, strengthening the technology backend and marketing. Our members participated in their later (bridge) round as well.

As time passed, the founders realized the importance of diversifying the platform. So they introduced test preparation and technology courses recorded from their in-house studio and formulated by their team.

This became a successful pivot, which started reflecting the commercial success from the beginning itself.

With the increasing popularity among users and successful operations, Ritesh Singh, the CEO at Eckovation received the honour of ‘Impact entrepreneurs and Change-Makers 2016’ award for his remarkable contribution to the education sector.

Their edtech app also achieved ‘app of the day’ recognition by Navbharat Times on may 4,2016.

Despite having a number of competitors like Knit, Flinnt and Mappr, Eckovation has successfully managed to make a mark and take up a sustainable position in the bag.

Eckovation’s major breakthrough in Social impact came with the recently launched Unnayan Banka project through the support of Bihar government with the objective of delivering smart education in the remote areas of India.

The idea is to work with underprivileged students who cannot afford education itself let alone buying smart education material.

The programme has received an applaudable response so far from all the stakeholders.

Eckovation has created a deep impact to students whilst building conceptual understanding and clarification through easy to understand, interactive and animated video lectures.

Using TVs, laptops, projectors and mobiles has made learning more interesting and feasible at the public and private schools. The traditional chalk and board learning method has been set aside and focus on the promotion of digital India is the core moto.

By analyzing the daily/ weekly performance of students using the AI based mobile platform, Eckovation does continuous monitoring while providing useful feedback.

Daily attendance and performance report cards are daily uploaded on the Eckovation platform for evaluation. Learning through these means also ensures capacity building of teachers and ease in the administration.

As a result, the employment opportunities and skill sets have improved. Unnayan Banka initiative has by far successfully placed 25 students belonging to the underprivileged category in IT major TCS.

The project has been recognized under the ‘Innovation’ category of Prime Minister’s excellence award for public administration, 2018.

In this entire process, Eckovation has partnered with various private and public schools to provide inclusive and accessible education.

Getting inspiration from the Unnayan Banka project, Godda district in Bihar has also followed the footsteps and collaborated with Eckovation.

By backing Eckovation, we became the proud partners in their endeavours for inculcating education in the remote unheard areas of India.

We take pride in speaking about their efforts in providing skills training to teachers and creating employability amongst the less privileged students.

Key lessons from the story are as below:-

1. The entrepreneurs should carve a niche they want to convincingly follow.
2. Even if there is an existing competition from the hugely funded companies, the new startups can evolve well with the honest intent to deliver.
3. Choose impact over commercial success. By focusing on delivering a large social impact, one can still generate money to sustain and rapidly grow.
4. The entrepreneurs should make pivots rapidly during their initial one to two years to smell success. Pivots are the changes you make in your business plan if things do not go as expected.
5. For every promising social impact venture, there are angel investors and networks like Chandigarh Angels Network who are ready to support.

Picture Credits: ekcovation.com