Hardeep Singh
Lead School provides a technology-based school reform framework that ensures children receive exceptional teaching. The EdTech group promotes the digitalization and transformation of reasonable non-public schools in order to better serve children from moderate and low-income households.
It creates a unified framework to assist K-12 schools in developing curriculum, and teaching methods, obtaining books and other resources from suppliers, and better-analyzing learning outcomes.
With critical use of technology and a centralised curriculum design team the association collaborates with public and non-public school proprietors to help with curriculum creation and educator preparation, allowing children from disadvantaged neighborhoods to access modest and excellent education.
The startup operates a school-based programming application. It possesses characteristics such as understudy learning observation, educator execution, instructor preparation, and course pleasant conveyance. It also provides electronic learning tools, in addition to traditional readers and exercise manuals, eBooks, and learning activities. Lead also offers a mobile version for Android phones and tablets.
Founders
Sumeet Mehta and Smita Deorah founded the Lead School in Mumbai, Maharashtra, in 2013.
Sumeet Mehta is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lead School. Sumeet has also served as a brand head for Olay Asia Pacific, Vicks, and Metamucil Asia Pacific. He formerly worked as an assistant brand supervisor at Zest Philippines. While, Smita Deorah, Co-founder, Chief Learning Officer, and Chief Operating Officer of Lead School, also established Sparsh, a non-benefit organisation whose mission is to influence the lives of small children from low-pay networks in the field of education, empowering them to expand their true capacity and carry on with life effectively, primarily by working for K-12 schools in rural and taluka regions and giving admission to a top-notch education. Lead School has a workforce of over 1000 members.
Startup Story
Affordable private schools that have sprung up in small networks as a substitute for free and low-quality government-funded schools are frequently considerably better. These institutions, which enroll between 2,00,000 and 4,00,000 students, have a dismal record of academic achievement. Unfortunately, neither NGOs nor initiatives working in the field of educational innovation have a lot of energy for them.
That is the distinction Sumeet Mehta (whose parents were also rural educators) and Smita Deorah have tried to make with their LEAD schools campaign. Both recognised that no one was resolving the issues that smaller towns’ APS were facing, so they decided to make a move by establishing their free schools.
When a friend offered them property in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in 2013, they took the plunge. They built the Shanti Niketan English School with their own money, starting with a number of pupils and gradually rising to roughly 25. They hired and trained a few local teachers. Regardless, Mehta quickly realised that offering good teaching to exceptional students was more difficult than they had anticipated.
Students could see the letters in sequence and recognise letters, but they struggled to put words together in a sentence. Furthermore, while they could react to a numerical statement using a recipe, they avoided answering questions written in English.
The company claims to provide small non-public schools with an integrated educational plan and mechanical arrangements, allowing them to deliver high-level instruction through the internet or a hybrid model. Sumeet Mehta and Smita Deorah founded LEAD with the goal of providing troublesome school edtech solutions to all partners.
The LEAD School group discovered that if the three critical concerns – a concentration on English, a more adaptable educational strategy, and a better-prepared instructor – were addressed, initial students leaped and filled gaps quickly.
The LEAD group grew as a result of their hard work paying off. Four new schools have been built in Maharashtra’s level III and level IV towns. They presently operate five schools with around 2000 students who pay educational costs ranging from Rs 12,000 to Rs 18,000 per year.
In 2016, they expanded their learning path to include partner schools, allowing the company to have a more significant impact on the lives of children. More than 3,000 LEAD Powered Schools are already utilising their well-informed general standard educational programme and collaborative arrangements.
Business Model, and Revenue Model
LEAD school is a software-as-a-service company that empowers and enhances educational institutions. It is a comprehensive examination, education, and retraining setup. Lead also offers a separate application for parents that allows them to track their children’s progress while also allowing their pupils to learn from home.
Charging schools an annual fee for each understudy. Adapting LEAD pays for itself since it eliminates the need for a plethora of various devices such as an LMS, reading material, and administrative programmes.
LEAD also increases school enrollment and contributes to school income. The fact that LEAD School has a net consistency rate of 100 percent indicates its exceptional selling proposition.
Growth and Revenues
LEAD School is the third company to enter India’s unicorn club in 2022, following direct-to-consumer brand Mamaearth and man-made brainpower firm Fractal. It is also the sixth edtech company in India to achieve unicorn status. Unicorns are privately held companies having a market valuation of at least $1 billion.
According to Mehta, LEAD School collaborates with over 3,000 schools in over 400 metropolitan neighborhoods. As of February 2022, the organization’s worth has more than doubled in the previous 9 months. The company hopes to reach 2 million youngsters throughout the country by the start of the next fiscal year. It currently serves more than 1.2 million students and more than 25,000 educators.
