THE CAMARADERIE between the four co-founders of SplashLearn is the first thing that strikes you when you meet them. Arpit Jain, CEO, Umang Jain, CPTO, Mayank Jain, CMO, and Joy Deep Nath, CXO who heads customer experience and new innovations, have known each other for 20 years (they met at IIT-Kharagpur).
They cut their teeth in the start-up world when they got together in 2007 to put the entire course of IIT-Kharagpur online. This was almost a decade before any of the international edtech platforms started using the internet. The project did not take off as expected but they learnt an important lesson—that they wanted to work in education.
The team decided to look at foundational level, especially as they wanted to focus on math and reading and make learning engaging and fun. They started using games to teach and decided to target the U.S. market first. “There is enough research around why games work for learning. Games slowly increase the challenge, failure does not deter the student, and the challenge drives them onwards. That is our holy grail,” says Mayank. “Our focus was to build a repertoire of games teaching math and reading to 3-11 year olds. We have the largest library of games at almost 5,000,” says Umang Jain. SplashLearn has 50 million kids on its platform. It wants to grow the number to 200 million.
The product has been in U.S. market for almost a decade. “Even today, in more than 90% U.S. schools, at least one teacher is using Splashmath,” says Mayank Jain. Now, the plan is to move from primary grades to middle school and eventually K12. “We recently introduced live classes,” says Arpit Jain. — Gina Krishnan