In November 2020, HolonIQ announced the annual India & South Asia EdTech 100 — a list of the 100 most promising EdTech startups headquartered in India and South Asia. As we open applications for our annual India South Asia EdTech 100, we take a look at where the 2020 cohort are now.
The HolonIQ India & South Asia EdTech 100 recognises the most promising EdTech teams based in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. This annual list helps to shine a light on education innovation across one of the largest education markets in the world, and the teams who are supporting educational access, efficiency and improved outcomes for learners.
EdTech in the South Asia region has seen significant growth over the past two years, particularly India, which is one of the fastest growing EdTech markets globally. The combination of India’s New Education Policy, which launched mid-2020 and represented a step-change in approaches to technology enabled learning, along with the impact of the pandemic, have catalysed India’s EdTech sector to new levels of market acceptance, usage and private capital investment. In 2020 alone there was $2.3B of EdTech venture capital investment in India, eclipsing Europe’s VC investment for the same period and just shy of the US figure. 2021 has seen an explosion of growth with $1.4B invested in the first half, again setting the benchmark for the biggest year yet in EdTech.
The Annual India & South Asia EdTech 100 recognises the most promising EdTech startups based in India and South Asia, which are privately owned and under 10 years old.
Governments and the media, institutions and investors, schools and educators, influencers and talent leaders from across the region and around the world look to HolonIQ’s India & South Asia EdTech 100 to understand the dynamics of innovation in the market.
HolonIQ's Scoring Fingerprint
In 2020, HolonIQ’s Education Intelligence Unit evaluated thousands of EdTech companies from India and South Asia, powered by data and insights from our Global Intelligence Platform and local experts. Each organization was assessed using our proprietary scoring engine and following HolonIQ’s startup scoring rubric. Our normalization algorithm ensures that individual scoring bias is eliminated to create an equitable baseline and allows experts to review their own ‘scoring fingerprint’ relative to other experts. HolonIQ’s startup scoring rubric covers the following dimensions:
Market. The quality and relative attractiveness of the specific market in which the company competes.
Product. The quality and uniqueness of the product itself.
Team. The expertise and diversity of the team.
Capital. The financial health of the company and in particular its ability to generate or secure sufficient funding.
Momentum. Positive changes in the size and velocity of the company over time.
