Powering Paperless Entry To Schools

The education landscape in India is complex and diverse. While a few select institutions like the IITs and IIMs get a large pool of applications, a host of good institutions do not even get sufficient applications to fill their quota of seats.   Even though the quality of the institution does play a role in attracting students, the way institutions woo prospective students also plays a role in attracting applications. NoPaperForms (NPF) emerged out of an urge to improve the process.  

NoPaperForms is a SaaS-based Enterprise Enrolment Management platform that seeks to revolutionise the Admissions management landscape in the country by digitising the complete enrolment process for schools and universities in India.  

“Our suite of products are enabling education institutions to manage the complete admission cycle from enquiry management to application automation to payment collection to issuance of final admissions offer. Our automated online platform provides a seamless omnichannel experience to the end-user and results in lesser cost and higher flexibility in the managing system. The high-end CRM module helps in lead nurturing, personalised communications, intelligent decision-making through high-end analytics and drip marketing to engage the most relevant audience. Through this, institutions will be able to centralise and store hard data points which can be sliced and diced to measure the effectiveness of the source point, communicate smartly with users and increase application conversion rates,” says Naveen Goyal, Founder and  CEO, NoPaperForms.  

NoPaperForms was conceptualised in January 2016 and registered as a company in February 2017. In a span of six months, the company has on board about 121 universities and schools in India and currently processes more than a million applications. Going forward, NoPaperForms hopes to process more than 50 million student applications to educational institutions through its platform.  

India has more than 1.5 million schools, more than 39,000 colleges, 800 plus universities and more than 5,000 examinations and their numbers are growing exponentially. But the entire ecosystem can serve just about 20 per cent of the total universe. Most of the institutions do not have the financial and technological muscle to automate applications, which is where a common application form fits in. And it fits like a glove with India’s Digital India mission. NoPaperForms is currently building architecture for a common app for India.

The startup was bootstrapped in its initial year of operation and raised its Series A funding of about $1 million from Info Edge (India). The company is closing the 2017-18 financial year with a revenue of $1 million and targets a revenue of $20 million in three or four years. NoPaperForms’ core leadership team combines a blend of technology and experience in the sphere of education. The company has a team of 47 members, with an average experience of five years in the industry, 70 per cent of whom are in the sphere of product and technology.

Application management in India is typically offline, or solved through complex old school software/ ERP solutions which come with heavy cost implications and are cumbersome and time consuming. NoPaperForms offers a SaaS-based modular product approach that enables the organisation to go live in a short spell on a pay per usage model. The costs are manageable.

“The biggest differentiator I would say, is our understanding and commitment to the education domain. We have deep and abiding interest in this sector and each module is designed to mitigate a pain point for the customer,” says Goyal. “The responsiveness of our suite of solutions can be gathered by the fact that we have on board 121+ universities/schools within a year of operations and the stickiness would only increase as they use more advanced modules. We seek to dominate the admission automation landscape in the country.  We are gunning to control 70-75 per cent application forms in India over a period of three or four years,” he adds.

Growth potential: NoPaperForms has 121 universities and schools in India on board. Going forward, it is looking to process 50 million student application submissions through its platform.