Internet firm Sulekha says will focus on ed-tech, Saas businesses

Company aims to have 125 million people using its English language learning app

Sulekha.com, one of India’s earliest internet companies and a marketplace for expert services, has said it will push its new businesses in education technology (ed-tech) and software as a service (SaaS).

The company said its English language learning application, Capshine, has got 200,000 downloads and around 1 million minutes. The app aims to reach 125 million people who are educated but are not fluent in the English language.

“Capshine is a simple app focused on improving English fluency by providing live conversational opportunities with fellow learners. Plus, it offers friendly, short, professional, vernacular videos to correct errors and address fluency issues,” said Satya Prabhakar, chief executive officer of Sulekha.com.

Prabhakar said that the company’s target is to focus on tier I and tier II cities and the lower economic strata in urban centres. “Our main objective is to develop fluency and also correct errors.  We are growing purely by word of mouth. Our objective is not to compete with the existing ed-tech players,” he said. Around 65 per cent of Capshine users are in non-urban areas. The company said that it was badly hit during the lockdowns for containing Covid-19 and saw depressed demand in 2021 and 2022.

“During the crisis, we spoke to a vast number of our users and SME customers and developed two technology platforms beyond Sulekha to serve them better,” he said. The first platform was ProManage, a digital marketing SaaS platform for businesses to manage local listings and get organic business growth. ProManage offers real-time distribution across all major search and technology platforms using real-time APIs (application programming interface).

“ProManage also offers a rich suite of features for analytics, insights, AI-driven profile optimization and conversational commerce to significantly improve customer engagement and brand reputation. ProManage is experiencing significant traction in customer adoption, onboarding several major brands,” he added.

ProManage has enterprise customers like City Union Bank, Shriram Transport Finance, Shriram City Union Finance and EuroKids.