Meet the 3 winners of Coimbatore's first education technology pitchfest

South India has a new start-up hub, reports Tech in Asia

Coimbatore is a relatively prosperous Tier-II city, sometimes referred to as the Manchester of South India because of its manufacturing. It is also an education hub, with a number of engineering colleges located there.

Today, it has aspirations of becoming a tech start-up hub.

One such initiative in pursuit of that goal was an education entrepreneurship summit over the weekend at Coimbatore’s new Forge accelerator. It included a boot-camp for 33 education technology start-ups followed by a pitchfest. Here are the three winners who emerged at the end:

Skaas

Skaas wants to provide skills as a cloud-based service. Its co-founder Vinoudini Boj explains to me that real-world skills, such as cloud computing, are sorely lacking in the hundreds of thousands of engineers that India churns out each year.

She became an entrepreneur to tackle this problem. Her start-up connects learners with industry professionals for job-oriented courses. Learning labs and projects on the cloud provide a real world feel. And Skaas aims to complete the loop by helping organisations find tech talent with work-ready skills.

SchoolSaamaan

It’s a marketplace for everything related to school, from uniforms and books to stationery and lunch boxes. Founder Amit Mishra felt the need for it when it came to sending his own kids to school. Schoolkart is a rival in this space, but SchoolSaamaan hopes to go one up by tying up with schools to meet their specific requirements.

Praqtise

Praqtise is a test prep site focusing on aptitude tests for MBA college entrance. It uses gamification and analytics to personalise the test prep for users. It uses a freemium model with a limited number of practice questions and solutions available for free, and unlimited access with payment.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here