Toppr.com Grabs $10M To Help Indian Students Prepare For Entrance Exams

Toppr.com, a Mumbai-based startup that helps students prepare for entrance exams, has raised $10 million from Fidelity Growth Partners India, SAIF Partners, and Helion Ventures. Founded in 2013, Toppr.com helps students study for entrance exams to engineering and medical schools, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (public universities that are considered the most prestigious engineering colleges in India).

Co-founder Zishaan Hayath says many schools do not offer adequate preparation for students that want to move on to higher education, which means they have to rely on private coaching. Toppr.com’s aims to make test prep affordable for as many students as possible. The company claims it already has 170,000 students on its platform, and hopes to grow that number to five million by 2017.

“India being the youngest country has the highest number of students enrolled in schools than any country in the world. Over 300 million students are studying in various schools across India, which is more than the entire population of the U.S. The current educational system is extremely inefficient and the only way to take a leap is through extensive use of technology,” Hayath tells TechCrunch.

Toppr.com’s platform is meant as a supplement to offline tutoring. It uses adaptive learning technology to customize teaching materials to each student’s needs and prepare them to cope with the demands of an entrance exam.

“The platform helps students understand the time spent on each question versus the optimal time to be spent on it and provides a goal-based approach to perfect a particular section,” Hayath says.

The startup’s competitors include sites like Embibe. Toppr.com recently bought another rival called EasyPrep and is looking for more acquisition targets. Offline coaching institutes are also an alternative, but Hayath says the platform is used by many of those organizations to analyze their students’ performance.

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