Mihir is the CEO & Co-Founder of Teachmint, an ed-infra startup, and creator of the integrated school platform. He spent the early years of his career as a consultant with McKinsey, working extensively in South East Asia and India. Prior to him taking the plunge into becoming an entrepreneur himself, Mihir contributed to the expansion journey of OYO and was part of their leadership team in Malaysia. Mihir also worked as the Business Head of Open Financial, launching new business lines. Mihir is an alum of IIT Bombay and graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. With his knack for entrepreneurship and deep subject matter expertise, Mihir is also one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 honorees. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mihir Gupta, CEO and Co-Founder of Teachmint.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Since Teachmint’s inception, we have been solving a universal problem statement in the education industry with our innovation in digital infrastructure. Over the past few years, there has been an exponential increase in the demand for technology built specifically for the education sector. While schools have been using multiple tools and platforms to solve specific problems, what has been missing is a one-stop platform that understands and solves all their needs. Teachmint’s Integrated School Platform is designed to power schools and institutes through infrastructure innovation with a combination of a state-of-the-art ERP, a modern LMS, and digital content unified into a comprehensive offering. With our SaaS offering, schools can digitize and strengthen every function from fee management, exam planning, and admission management to classroom engagement, student and teacher performance, parent engagement and more! The platform is now available in 20+ languages and has served more than 15 million users from 30+ countries on its platform.

2. With what mission and objectives, was the company set up? In short, tell us about your journey since inception.

Everyone at Teachmint is driven by the singular mission of expanding the potential of education. As the pandemic disrupted the education system across the globe, we realized the unaddressed challenges many educators and institutes faced. One of our co-founders, Payoj Jain, runs a family-owned CBSE school which allowed us to truly understand the gap in school and teacher digitization. From multiple, disconnected tools to gaps in the understanding of technology, we realized that a truly hygiene yet comprehensive digital infrastructure had not been built for schools and educators at scale.

We started solving this by introducing the Teachmint mobile app in May 2020, which helped teachers digitize their classrooms in minutes. From taking live classes, creating and grading assignments to sharing notes, our all-in-one platform simplified the way teachers conducted their classes online. Our proprietary technology and video stack, being mobile-first and low bandwidth optimized, led to massive adoption in just a few months since our launch. We have served over 1.5 crore teachers and students so far. We further expanded our offerings and in less than a year since its inception and launched our flagship product – The Integrated School Platform. This is a first-of-its-kind SaaS for schools and institutes to digitize all their operations on a single platform and boost efficiencies and outcomes for all stakeholders. As schools have reopened the past year, we have seen high adoption of our offerings and we continue to build deeper capabilities to strengthen it.

3. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients’ feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

One of the core values at Teachmint is Customer Obsession. We are constantly striving to build the best possible experience for our customers – educators and school leaders. Each day their work makes a potentially life-long impact on students, and this is why we refer to them as ‘Changemakers’. We have been able to further boost their impact with our Integrated School Platform by digitizing their operations, saving their time, reducing overhead costs, empowering and upskilling their teachers with the latest tech as well as by strengthening their connection with their larger ecosystem – students and parents!

We have also been fortunate to be recognized at several Indian and Global platforms like Forbes 30 u 30, Most transformational companies in GSV #EdTech150’22, Emerging Startups 2022 by Traxcn, Technode APAC Origin innovation awards among others.

4. Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

The on-ground experience and in-depth insights we had into running our school’s day-to-day proceedings gave us a very unique and game-changing perspective on what solutions we wanted to build. Our first-hand experience allowed us to preempt most of the challenges and solve them. We realized through our testing that the biggest barrier to adoption would be bandwidth optimization and built a low-bandwidth, mobile-first platform from day 1.

5. What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

We are focused on expanding our product offerings and going deeper into the markets currently we have a presence.

6. The advancement of SaaS has influenced customers on their current and future needs. Explain the challenges customers face to have the SaaS in place.

In recent years tech adoption has seen exponential growth in the education sector. School leaders are increasingly understanding the value of software integrations for school management and are looking for intuitive and comprehensive solutions to give them an edge. Despite the accelerated acceptance, educators are grappling with multiple fragmented products to meet their needs. This lack of unification increases workload and the chances of errors. Not to mention the overall cost incurred from using multiple products. With a robust integrated Saas platform, that unifies modern LMS, ERP, and digital content, schools will have everything they need in one place and make adoption effortless for their teachers, students, and parents alike. Our Integrated School Platform is witnessing immense adoption and we expect to further increase growth and penetration in the coming years.