Doubtnut gives students free video solution to their maths problems

Doubtnut claims it has one of the largest libraries of curriculum-specific educational content videos

Ever asked a school-going student what he or she hates the most? Do not be surprised if most of them say it is mathematics. Thousands of coaching centres have mushroomed across the country cashing in on the fear of the subject, but struggles of school students do not seem to have become any less.
 
The emerging education technology sector has the potential to rid the students of their conventional fear. Gurgaon-based Doubtnut, an ed-tech startup founded in 2016, through its app gives students free video solution to their maths problems.
 
The app solves the problem in real-time.
 

It allows students to scan a mathematics question, deciphers it through artificial intelligence and provides a corresponding video solution from the Doubtnut library. The company claims it has created one of the largest libraries of curriculum-specific educational content videos.

 
Founded by two IIT graduates Tanushree Nagori and Aditya Shankar, Doubtnut recently raised Rs 35 million in a pre-Series A round led by WaterBridge Ventures and Omidyar Network. The company wants to use the funds to expand its platform, add subjects, and support more regional languages.
 
Doubtnut claims to have answered more than 5,000 questions and 15,000+ video views per day. The company’s aim is to answer more than 150,000 questions every day by the end of this year.

 
A major challenge for the company, according to one of the founders, Tanushree Nagori, is “how we scale across various languages that people speak, write or understand across India. The technology part of how we read various languages is something we have already solved to some extent. The app can read questions in Hindi and we will scale it to 12 more Indian languages in the next couple of quarters. We are now solving questions in the same language in which we received them by using machines to translate.”
 
There are around 300 million students in India, making the ed-tech space an opportunity worth $1 billion.

 
Search-answers-from-photograph-recognition apps have matured in China. A few Chinese apps like Yuansouti, Zuoyebang, Afanti, and Xueba100 are in the Q&A domain serving millions of daily active users.
 
Doubtnut plans to raise Series A funding by the end of the year. It also wants to have a monthly active users base of around 1 million. The company wants to hit a revenue of more than Rs 200 million in FY2019-20. Nagori says: “This service is free as of today and we expect it to be really affordable even when we monetise it fully.”
 
It remains to be seen how many doubts ‘Doubtnut’ solves in India’s education system.