Cuemath to focus on Ai-based lessons and consultative sales
BENGALURU/ MUMBAI: Online math learning startup Cuemath is adopting consultation-based sales, extending its core programmes and investing in artificial intelligence (AI) tools for personalized learning, foun-der and president Manan Khurma said.
Cuemath, which hired former Swi-ggy chief operating officer Vivek Sunder as its CEO this month, is planning to extend its math courses to include data sciences, computational learning, real-world math, reasoning and coding, Khurma said in an interview.
Cuemath has already raised about $67 million from Alphabet (the parent of Google Inc.), Falcon Edge, Sequoia Capital and others. The company is closing in on a $100 million fundraising by the first quarter of 2022 and expects to cross $1 billion in valuation by the end of 2022.
In its last fundraising of about $40 million last December, Cuemath was valued at about $175 million.
“We think there are five or six extensions to math that every kid should be exposed to. Ultimately, our goal is to help kids see that math is universal. It’s not just the stuff you do in the classroom. Most parents and most kids feel that math is just arithmetic, you know, which is like, calculating stuff. Math is far more, it’s logical thinking, it’s data science, it’s real-world math. We want to bring out all these elements,” Khurma said.
Edtech companies cannot bank on the fear of missing out (FOMO) any longer, Khurma said, adding consultative selling, where parents understand what they are getting into, is a far more sustainable approach for growth.
“We think the outcomes will actually be higher by moving away from push-based sales to consultative selling because parents will trust you far more and sales will close faster,” he said.
“FOMO has stopped working, given how so many players have emerged and everyone is trying the same tricks,” Khurma said, adding the company has set up internal mechanisms to discourage this approach. Cuemath sales executives are rewarded not just by the revenue they generate but also by whether the sales pitch was framed correctly and by whether the parent is happy several months after the purchase.
“If you say, hey, your salary is X, and I want you to generate 3X in a month, obviously, they (salesperson) will be incentivized to do all kinds of wrong things, including making false promises. But if you, for example, also stack on the metric that after the sale is made, the parteachers), ent post X months in the system is happy because they got what they were promised, then the sale was closed in the right way. You could actually monitor and sample calls and see whether salespeople are actually saying the right things, or are making false promises and so on,” he explained.
India’s edtech ecosystem has moved in a slightly negative direction because of an aggressive sales push by some edtech firms, Khurma said, predicting the trend will correct soon. “The real value will, then, emerge,” he said.
Earlier this month, Cuemath put some of its math content online for free. In the long run, the company believes monetizing content is passive and not going to cut it anymore. “The edtech industry will evolve into a situation where content is free, and what is monetized is the time of the experts/teachers,” he said. Similarly, the real value is in teaching children to acquire ‘mastery’ over math as a ‘language’ or a ‘life skill’, instead of preparing them just for school exams, he added.
In FY20, Cue Learn Pvt. Ltd, its parent company, reported total revenue of ₹28.4 crore, up about 77% from FY19. Its loss narrowed to ₹55.3 crore from ₹56.3 crore a year earlier. It is yet to file financials for FY21.
The company expects to double its current annual recurring revenue (ARR) to $100 million by June 2022, Khurma said.