Getting into a good IIT is a dream that many students harbour, however due to many obstacles, they fail to achieve the goal. Bangalore based ed-tech company Newtown School aims to provide quality learning opportunities to such aspirants through an online platform for engineering students. The company plans to utilise the recently raised funds worth of $25 million, to accelerate the company’s growth and expand its team, technology and brand building initiatives, introduce new courses, and aims to reach $100 million in annualised run rate by 2023. “This fundraise will enable us to build a strong brand and leadership team while investing in innovative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to transform education,” Siddharth Maheshwari, co-founder, Newton School said to FinancialExpress Online.
The ed-tech claims that its primary revenue source is course based subscription model and it works on Business-to-Consumer (B2C) based business models. In CY2021, Newton School claims to have enrolled around 5,000 students of the 2,38,263 registrations. However, in CY2022, the company aims to enrol more than 20,000 students. “Newton School mostly focuses on students from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, who cannot get into IITs and IIMs due to several reasons, in addition to students from unprivileged backgrounds,” Maheshwari said.
Regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler reveals that Newton School revenue from operations increased around 4520% to Rs 4.2 crore in FY21 from Rs 9.2 lakh, during the same period in the previous fiscal. The company’s net loss witnessed 150% to Rs 4.5 crore in FY 21 when compared to a net loss of Rs 1.8 crore in FY20. The company claimed that it utilises nearly 70% of its expenses in product development, 20% for salary purposes, and 10% for marketing and branding. “We were running another startup before Newton School under the same company, which was not revenue generating. The operation for Newton School started in late 2019. This is the reason why in 2019 the revenue is comparatively lesser than the next year,” Maheshwari said.
With the fresh sets of funds, the company aims to introduce new courses around JAVA and Spring Boot. It further plans to launch a flexible module for enterprises where companies can come and be a part of the training. According to Maheshwari, the school will take care of the initial five or six months of the students, after which companies can give one or two months of training on the technologies as per their need. “This module will allow companies to cut off the cost of training and hire the best students,” he added.
However, as the cost of these pursuing professional courses tend to be on the higher end, the school claims to have created a rather affordable system. It offers a pay-after-placement agreement scheme, where a student can enrol and complete the course without paying any tuition fee. However, once they get a placement, they need to pay back the fees over a period of 36 months. The school offers two types of programs, which include a six months professional program designed for final year engineering students, comprising 30-40 hours. The second is a master’s degree program designed for non-tech professionals who want to switch to tech jobs. The ed-tech company claims that for the masters program it offers scholarships of maximum Rs 50,000 depending upon the eligibility criterias. In addition, Newton School claims that it has collaborated with universities from across the world, including MIA Digital University, Spain and IU International University of Applied Science, Germany, for its masters programme.
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