Exec summary
- 1. AGEM - Making education meaningful When one thinks of impaired social systems, one thinks of Afghanistan, not Scandinavia. The fundamental differences are education and health-care. Education is the catalyst for health-care, democracy, civic dialogue and job creation - all vital necessities in developing nations including India - the first focus of our work. The AGEM initiative addresses these issues. 1 The Problem and the solution K12 education across India is a broken system that the Govt. is trying to address without success. AGEM’s services and products provide classrooms across the country the content, embedded questions for evaluation, wireless feedback devices for immediate graphical feedback, and the ability to archive performance data. That allows us to analyze and report on remedial measures for students, teachers, schools and our own content. Our solution is scalable, affordable, effective and measurable. Most importantly it leaves an audit trail of perfor- mance without the need for high stakes examinations. 2 The opportunity and our competitive advantage India has 200 million students in K12 Education. Our first target will be Grades 6 to 8 extending via this cohort to Grade 12, for schools that are under CBSE - the dominant board of education in the country in terms of reach and quality. There are 4 million children in this category nationwide in Central Govt. and private schools. Our first market will be the approximately three million children in private schools in the K6-12 sector. Our core characteristic is the ability to blend software, hardware, measurement and content into the development of our products and the ability to fine tune it each day from the data that we receive from classrooms using the AGEM system. Our primary competitive advantage is that we measure our performance every day in respect of each student. There is no evidence that any competitor is either measuring or promoting their efficacy in this way. Finally, no competitor approaches our pricing, nor are their systems as scalable. Our systems need neither textbooks nor homework. It is interesting that CBSE has just announced that the examination system will change to an open book system to reduce the need for rote learning and focus on inferential capability. This validation of our approach is heartening. 3 Our team Our founder researched our product for more than a decade. He setup two elite schools where initial versions of the methodology were successfully implemented. Evolving versions were used for validation purposes in urban and rural environments in more than 6 Indian states. A Pilot project in a local school has yielded unexpected gains using 3 independent measures with the latest technology. Our hardware developer specializes in low power drain wireless devices which address the key issue of uncertain electrical supplies in India. Hence, our feedback devices operate for a year without change of battery. The younger members of our team bring the software, marketing and logistics skills needed for this project. 4 The promise We have in the last few months tested our pricing in three schools at annual prices ranging from USD60 to USD 90 per student for one hour of complementary instruction per week in maths. Signed agreements have been received from the first two and we are awaiting the final one. We expect to cover more than 300 schools in 5 years to achieve a cumulative profitability of about USD55 million at annual prices of less than USD40 per student per subject. No account is being taken of additional revenue sources such as franchising, production of wireless sensors for data collection, certification charges, and its scope in other regions. 5 Funding Our first round of funding requires USD 500 thousand to service schools in Bangalore. A second round of funding of the same amount will be required in 2 years time when we go all India.