Chennai: Mrugan, son of a daily wage labourer and graduate of a government college in Tamil Nadu, had an aptitude for technology but struggled to code as he was not proficient in English. He then came across GUVI, an edtech startup that teaches coding in regional languages. It changed his life. He landed a job in a technology company in Chennai first, moving to Bengaluru next, and is now in Silicon Valley.
GUVI was founded by Arun Prakash, a graduate of a tier-2 city college in Madurai. When he returned to his alma mater as a successful software engineer after a decade, he found the students’ employability skills questionable.
“Technology is not easy by itself and when people learn it in English, it is all the more intimidating. I could see the gap between academia and industry there,” Prakash says.
His YouTube tutorial on coding in ‘Tanglish’ (Tamil + English) had hit one million views in a month’s time and that was all the validation Prakash needed to start GUVI in 2014 along with his wife Sridevi and friend Bala Murugan.
GUVI’s platform offers live classes and self-paced courses across C++, Java, Python, big data, machine learning, and R programming in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali and Kannada. Imparting the training in regional languages and at affordable prices, it has impacted over 1.5 million learners with almost 60%-70% of them learning in
Tamil.”Getting incubated at IIT-Madras’ Rural Technology Business Incubator in 2014 was our first win and it has been a rollercoaster ride since then,” he says.
While it was a struggle to close sales with colleges and companies in the early days, the December 2015 floods in Chennai completely broke down sales channel. They could not even pay salaries for a couple of months. Just as they stabilized from the shock, the pandemic struck – a disaster that impacted both the company and touched the entrepreneurs’ lives. The team lost co-founder Sridevi to Covid-19, delivering a crushing personal and professional blow. “Sridevi was the operations whiz and it was pretty horrible for a few months. We are literally rising from the ashes,” Prakash says.
From that low point, GUVI is today a cash flow positive startup that is declining buy-out requests by edtech majors. Besides directly reaching out to learners, it also ties up with companies today, allowing them to tap into the GUVI pool for their hiring and training needs.
From three people in 2014 the startup now has more than 110 employees. It has raised more than $1 million from US-based VC firm Gray Matter Capital and others. It was also supported by Google’s Launchpad Accelerator Program in 2017.
GUVI also recently partnered with AICTE to bring Python and AI courses to more than one million disadvantaged students free of cost and in local languages, under the government’s National Educational Alliance for Technology (NEAT 3.0).
“We have not even reached 10% of our vision and want to impact the lives of more than five million students next year,” Prakash says.
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