Our aim is to become a billion dollar company by the end of 2022: Arvind Iyer, Cuemath

• The pandemic has helped the edtech sector in India flourish. Many players have witnessed impressive growth since the lockdown led to closure of educational institutes.
• Cuemath, an edtech platform focused on Math and coding grew 3X last year and is expecting to top that this year. It is also confident of becoming a unicorn by 2022.
• We talk to Arvind Iyer, Marketing Director, Cuemath who tells us about the platform's growth story and all that its doing to bring more students to its platform.

The last one year has been a blessing in disguise for the edtech industry. While over the past few years the sector had being growing steadily, the pandemic gave the sector just the tailwind it needed.

According to a recent report released by transaction advisory firm RBSA Advisors, the Indian edtech sector will take off, from its current market size of about $700-800 million to $30 billion in the next 10 years.

While we have seen players that cover the entire spectrum of education, multiple subjects, test preparations, competitive exams, there also are subject-specific platforms that are making their presence felt in the domain.

Cuemath was started in 2013 by Manan Khurma who had just graduated from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. After graduating, he started teaching, predominantly Maths, to a lot of aspirants to help them crack the JEE. His experience with many of the students made him realize that most of them did not have clarity on the fundamentals of the subject. Resultantly, they were struggling with advanced concepts like trigonometry and calculus. That led to the genesis of Cuemath, that started out in an offline format but has now gone online.

The platform, in the initial few years, found growth primarily through word-of-mouth. What started in India soon found takers in other countries too, considering every child, across the globe, has to learn Math. In fact, currently, Cuemath is present in 20 countries, a number that the leaders hope to take to 50 by the end of this year.

“Math is a universal need. It’s not a niche need. Every kid around the world needs to do Math. Therefore, every student is our target student. We are therefore creating and enhancing our market. And since Math is a basic global requirement, we get an edge over our competition,” said Arvind Iyer, Marketing Director, Cuemath.

Currently, Cuemath’s key markets are across four regions, North America and Canada; the Middle East, especially Dubai and Qatar, UK and Europe, where its business is growing steadily. The startup currently has plans of scaling 3-4X times in the US alone this year. “Cuemath is present in 20-odd countries, and it wants to reach over 50 countries by the end of this year. This plan includes strengthening its presence in North America, APAC, UK and Europe, and the Middle East, as well as entering countries in Africa and South America,” explained Iyer.

The platform also underwent a rebranding recently to represent its evolution in the past 1.5 years, primarily its pivot from an offline to an online entity. The rebranding entails a new logo and colour palette.


Explaining the thought behind the rebranding, Iyer said, “We want to make parents and students believe in the power of math and its potential to unlock innumerous possibilities. We intend to project ourselves as a brand of consequence where intuition for math trumps marks and performance in exams. Being a company that works at scale across geographies, we needed a winning strategy that will be in alignment with our mission to be a Global Math Leader of the future - to portray trust, expertise, and freshness, globally. This needed a fresh way of looking at our brand, our visual identity, and our communication objectives which are: to come across as trustworthy but not formal, to sound lighthearted but not juvenile, to have academic rigor but not be strict and to be viewed as innovative not newfangled.”

It has also refreshed its tagline to ‘Get better at Math, Get better at everything else’.

When it comes to marketing, the platform has been following a targeted approach, while monitoring its funnel conversion metrics closely. “We are constantly improving our communication assets to make them work harder for the parent, and get them to discover the Cuemath method. We believe in always adding value to the lives of parents, students and teachers. Everything we do is a reflection of what they seek and find useful. Having said that, our focus this year is going to be on building brand awareness and performance marketing to acquire new students through all our social, digital, TV and PR channels,” explained Iyer.

If a recent estimate from KPMG is to be believed, India has more than 3,500 edtech startups. So how does one break the clutter? “I strongly believe that the pedagogy we adopt here at Cuemath is a major factor to give us an edge over our competitors. We are obsessed about having this constant zeal to help the child so that his or her learning graph just keeps going higher. We take pride in portraying math as a life skill which can make children better at everything by enhancing their critical and analytical thinking which many of our competitors don’t do,” he added.

Owing to the fact that the knowledge of Math is a universal requirement, Iyer is confident that they will be able to capture the global markets too. Since 2017, it has grown over 10 times, from Rs 15 crore to now a Rs 150 crore company. From 7000 students on its platform in 2017, the platform grew to 60,000 students in 2020. From 1000 in 2017, it increased its teachers count to 10,000 in 2020.

“We have very strong unit economics, which means we don’t lose any money on a consumer acquisition but on an overall level since we are re-investing all of our revenue back into growth, we aren’t profitable yet. So profitability right now isn’t a goal, but growth is the focus. The Math market around the world is a 20 Billion Dollar market and we plan to win that market. Our focus is to drive growth and become a unicorn, a billion dollar company by the end of 2022,” concluded Iyer on an optimistic note.