Cracking JEE: Amazon India forays into ed-tech space

Amazon India on Wednesday forayed into the growing ed-tech space by announcing the launch of Amazon Academy which would help students prepare for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering colleges. The online preparation offering will equip students with in-depth knowledge and practice routines required for the JEE, through curated learning material, live lectures and comprehensive assessments in Math, Physics and Chemistry,

Amazon said in a statement. In addition to the JEE, those preparing for other engineering entrance exams like BITSAT, VITEEE, SRMJEEE and MET can also benefit from the available content resources. The content is currently available for free and will continue to be for the next few months, the firm said.

The ed-tech space is quite competitive with players like Byju’s and Unacademy already having carved a niche for themselves. This segment has seen a further traction during the pandemic which gave an impetus to online learning methods.

In an interview with FE in September last year, Byju Raveendran, founder and CEO at Byju’s, had mentioned that the company added more than 25 million free users on the platform in the last five months compared to just above 40 million in the first four-and-a-half years. “Students who benefited by accessing the content signed up for subscription…We are at 4.5 million paid users on a 70 million free user base. Now, a lot of users will continue learning online on the other side of the crisis and we expect the conversion to actually increase,” Raveendran had said.

Experts point out that ed-tech is growing on the back of changes in the approach to education and the rapid rise in the use of smartphones. Of the three broad categories – K-12 supplementary teaching for grades 1-12, test-preparation and higher education – analysts at HSBC reckon K12 offers the most potential. “K-12 is unsurprisingly the biggest opportunity and we think the market can grow up to $5 billion in 5-7 years. Test-prep, which is higher education and government examinations could be a $1.5-billion opportunity over the similar time frame,” Yogesh Aggarwal and AbhishekPathak wrote in a recent report.

The ed-tech sector has been cornering the bulk of the start-up funding. Byju’s alone secured more than $1 billion from investors in 2020. Unacademy, Eruditus and Vedantu collectively raised over $500 million from investors.