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Test prep startup ToppersNotes on Monday announced that it has raised $1 million in a seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures. The round also saw participation from LetsVenture, PlanB Capital, Pulkit Agrawal (CEO – Trell), Ashish Sharma, (MD – Innoven capital) and other notable angels.

The fund raised will be used to acquire talent, boost technology, and expand the presence across multiple exams.      

Founded in 2015 by IIT Bombay alumni Ayush Agarwal, Devendra Dhaka, and Arpit Bansal, the test-prep platform primarily provides students with curated sets of books, compiled by toppers.

Ayush Agrawal, Founder, Toppersnotes, said,

“With personalised learning, guidance, and performance analytics features, we will disrupt the test prep space, where students, even today, rely heavily on textbooks, distant coaching, and local tutors. We intend to leverage technology and content to reduce the service layer present in the education industry thus democratising education and making it affordable for everyone.”

IPV got co-aligned with our vision; with their mentorship and support, we would be able to define how Tier II and below students will learn, despite low family incomes.”

Market size and traction

Edtech has become one of the fastest-growing industries in recent times with test prep as the fastest growing category in online education. More than eight crore students prepare for more than 600 exams every year with more than 60 percent of these students residing in small towns and face affordability issues during their preparation.

According to the startup, the market is huge and fragmented which Toppersnotes is trying to disrupt by creating a comprehensive and affordable solution.

It is currently active in 70+ exams like UPSC, GATE, NEET, IIT, SSC, BANK, and state-level government job exams solving a real issue of unavailability of affordable solutions in tier II and tier III cities, and below markets with an intention to emerge as a market leader in the test prep market segment.

The startup claims to have more than 300,000 registered aspirants primarily from tier III and below townships on its platform. Toppersnotes aims to make self-study more efficient and personalised with the use of technology and provide learning at 1/10th of a coaching institute fees.

Mitesh Shah, Co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures, added,

“Prepping for competitive tests is one of the most important journeys in a student’s life cycle as they decide the direction of one’s career. While metros offer many options to students, it is the smaller cities where we have seen the gap in the quality of mentoring and preparation of exams.

Students run pillar to post and use peer group support. Toppernotes is solving this problem for the Bharat audience, which is a far bigger market than the metros and immensely underserved.”

With the Phygital solution (to be scaled in the next six months), students will have access to personalised content delivery, enhanced performance tracking and guidance in terms of personalised revision planner and learning schedules. To bring personalisation features and guidance to the study table, the team will be leveraging AI/ML and NLP algorithms on top of their deeply structured learning data of the students.

Their phygital solution currently offers physical notes for learning and tech-based app platform for test prep.