Gives a Leg Up to Job Aspirants

Ashutosh Kumar launched Testbook in 2014 to transform the way prospective job aspirants prepare, especially for public sector jobs. The Testbook Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer wanted to transform the examination preparation process into a tech-driven, automated system. The goal was to enable students and job aspirants to learn, absorb and prepare for these examinations at their own pace.

“I started my career as a physics teacher for JEE aspirants in 2007 while pursuing the first year of my dual degree of B.Tech and M. Tech in Metallurgical Engineering and Material Science from IIT Bombay,” recalled Kumar. Kumar’s entrepreneurial journey, however, began with Recharge 123, an aggregator platform for mobile phone recharging in 2009, while he was in the third year at IIT, Bombay.

Kumar co-founded Excelmentors.com in 2012, a platform that provided mentorship to JEE aspirants by IIT students who were trained as mentors. The EdTech startup, Testbook, emerged from his vision to ensure careers for the more than 100 million youth around the country by providing them with a highly personalised learning and assessment platform for preparing for government job examinations.

Ashutosh Kumar co-founded the platform with three fellow IITians, Narendra Agrawal, Praveen Agrawal and Manoj Munna. According to Kumar, Testbook’s innovations are geared towards making the life of students from tier-2 and tier-3 cities easier by removing entry barriers, like affordability, internet connectivity, languages, and the quality of education. Basically, Testbook aims to democratise the examinations preparation process for the less fortunate.

Testbook has successfully deployed technology to enable seamless live video lecture streaming and mock test practice even without active internet, which has become a very powerful value proposition for students preparing on the platform from smaller towns and villages of India. The core of all Testbook technology is the Testbook Learning App and website.

The app and the website are backed by world-class assessment and learning products with a host of features to help students take live interactive classes, practice questions, take mock tests, read and save notes, clear their doubts, etc..

The strong analytics engine recommends to students what to focus on to get maximum impact for their preparation. “We are using a scalable microservice architecture with Golang, Redis, Rabbitmq, and MongoDB for its backend. For the Angular framework for Web and for the Android platform, we use native Kotlin development with MVVM (Model-view-ViewModel) architecture,” said Kumar.

Testbook has also built multiple in-house tech platforms for the most cost-efficient and data-driven operations which include Analytics Engine, Live Class Streaming Infra, Assessment Engine, Sales CRM (ML Powered), Teacher Teaching Platform, Class Scheduling System, and Learning Management System (LMS which is ML-powered).

Kumar firmly believes that digitisation of education in India will be the key to the future framework of education. “It is astonishing to perceive how innovation has become more brilliant and is changing the educational system of the country,” said Kumar, adding, “It is additionally helping in researching the idea of collective learning ...”