Birth of Zucate

The founders of Zucate Moitreyee and Roli are best of friends from their MBA from Symbiosis. Six months into our corporate jobs was enough to make us realize that we need to do something of our own.

In an exploration to identify business options we came across an article on the internet which promoted online portals to find students for tuitions and learning centers. Since we both were experienced with CBSE, ICSE, State Boards as well as engineering, medical and commerce streams of education, we readily adopted the idea of opening our own learning center in Pune and named it Enlightening Minds.

We wanted to see the market response so we started with a small facility at our 1 BHK with just 1 student from day one. The response was such that we grew to a full fledged learning center in no time with 50 students by the end of one year. The numbers kept growing in the next few years. By the end of the 3 years we were already catering to more than 300 students between the two of us. In the last 6 odd years we have had the opportunity to cater and participate in the success stories of more than 650 students witnessing an overall of 135% improvement. Parents attribute this phenomenal success rate to the unique pedagogy that we adopted to teach students.

This brick-n-mortar setup of ours taught us intricacies of business at the minutest level. We went from society-to-society and trees-to-pole to put our pamphlets for promoting quality education. It taught us direct marketing, online promotions, goal-setting, financial management, resource optimization, people management, customer relations and quantification of progress. We taught students from CBSE, ICSE and Maharashtra boards who hailed from various parts of India originally. This gave us a broader perspective on the school education ecosystem across the country.

There were constraints such as high cost of setting up more brick-n-mortar centers, lack of staff, etc. that were stopping us from expanding across the city. Parents enquiries were increasing but we could not cater to them as they either didn’t want to send their children far from home or they were working and did not have time to drop their kids. This led to the ideation of ZUCATE as the best possible solution to expand to take our pedagogy of teaching online to cater to large mass of students not only throughout Pune City but across India.

Teaching all those students we realized that there were a certain set of problems that persisted in every student. All of our students were facing problems like difficulty in finding teaching and doubt clearing support 24*7, lack of relevant and appropriate content online as well as offline, large teacher:pupil ratio, introversion, concept related issues, lack of clarity when it comes to putting thoughts to writing and so on. We wanted to know whether this problem existed in entire India or was only a problem with the limited number of students we were teaching. We hence initiated a market research across 10 cities (Pune, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Raipur, Kolkata, Bangalore, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, New Delhi) with 1170 students and parents and 250 teachers teaching various subjects in different boards. We chose students from economically & academically weak and strong backgrounds (from Govt. + Govt. aided and private schools) and also went on to talk with their parents. We built our first product- A Mobile App based on this research and tested it with 250 students to understand the student’s behavior across learning outcomes and implied those results to devise a solution strategy for service offering of Zucate.

ZUCATE is a web and mobile based platform in K-12 segment that assists students in their school curriculum. We have developed a learning experience from content to testing in various formats and analytics that provides customization suited to the student’s intellect and grasp. Zucate has been incepted with an intent for innovation in visual learning which as per numerous research has been proven to increase the learning efficiency by 323%.

Zucate aims to be the leading education technology platform whose value will be perceived as:

• A continuous access to quality content and a learning pedagogy that builds a rock-solid foundation of visual concepts is the most potent and positive outcome.
• The students have a deeper understanding of what, how and why of learning with all the doubts resolved.
• Continuous and comprehensive testing to have a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the child with a customised learning curve and customising the content as per child’s understanding.
• Every child accessing our platform has access to a multitude of teachers across India for doubt clearing and even tutoring to ensure blended learning.
• Informed decision making for parents about their child’s progress and awareness about the do's and don’ts

We at Zucate believe that this unique and personalized solutions for school students has the power to change the way the world studies today and provide them instant support as and when required. Education ecosystem in India is transforming at a rapid pace with the growth of internet and penetration of schools to the remotest part of India. We aim to leverage this network to touch and change the lives of students at every nook and corner of India. We have the vision to transform every student story into a success story.