A Brief Look Into Eduhive’s Business and Competitive Landscape of EdTech in Bangladesh

In March 2021, Startup Bangladesh Ltd, the flagship venture capital fund of the ICT Ministry of Bangladesh, announced a fund worth $1.75 million for 7 Bangladeshi startups. Eduhive is one of those 7 startups.

Founded in Dec 2018 by Md. Nazmul Haque Sarkar, Eduhive is a Dhaka-based ed-tech platform that aims to make online education available to everyone in the country.

A product of TechHive Ltd, the ed-tech platform has seen significant growth within just two years of its inception. Apart from producing its content, the platform has also partnered with other educational institutions such as S@aifur’s, Tesol Bangladesh, Omeca Academic & Admission Coaching Centre, etc, to provide quality education across the country through their platform.

Details:

• Eduhive provides a wide range of educational content including content for the students of class 9 to 12, university admissions candidates, BCS, and other job entrance examinees.
• Eduhive launched its mobile app in August 2019 allowing students access its content through the app besides its websites. The public data suggests the app has been downloaded over 100k times.
• Eduhive has a freemium business where it offers some content for free while others require payment. 
• Eduhive has been working with prominent offline coaching centers as well as making model tests from these coaching centers available on the platform. Currently, students can take model tests of Retina, UCC, Omeca, Icon Plus, Primate, Climax, Prantik, Confirm, Physics Care, Biology Care, Math Lab, and Chemistry Zone on the Eduhive platform.
• In January 2021 Eduhive announced a scholarship program EduHive Scholar, worth tk 1.5 million, for this year’s HSC candidates where a total of 286 students including a male and a female student from each district will be given the scholarship.

Competitive Landscape

Throughout the past few years, there has been a surge of online education platforms in Bangladesh. Right now some of the popular platforms in the ed-tech niche are 10 Minutes School, Bohubrihi, Thrive EdTech, Shikho, Durbin Academy, etc. One of the reasons behind the increasing number of online education platforms is the growing rate of internet penetration resulting in more people joining the online education platforms as an alternative to offline education.

The coronavirus pandemic has pushed many offline education platforms to shift to online driving up the overall adoption of online education in the country. . Moreover, the shutdown of educational institutions due to the pandemic has also aided the demand for online education.

Online education has several limitations such as lack of interactive learning sessions, communication, etc. Despite these limitations, a growing number of people are adopting online education for reasons like:

• Online education is accessible from anywhere anytime.
• One of the disadvantages of offline education is learners have to invest a significant amount of time from their schedule to attend offline classes which are quite hard for busy professionals. Online classes resolve this issue. 
• If someone fails to attend their online lessons, they can still get the recording of the class as well as the class contents which helps them to keep pace with the rest of the class.

From the current situation, it can be predicted that the ed-tech market will continue to grow in Bangladesh beyond the pandemic. The key challenge for the ed-tech platforms is and will be to expand beyond the urban centers and develop a value proposition that resonates with a larger customer segment.