Next Education buys Xolvr

Next Education, a Hyderabad based learning solutions provider for K-12 students, has acqui-hired Gurugram based education technology startup Xolvr. This is the company’s third acquisition in the past 12 months.

Xolvr connects students from grades six to 12 with undergraduate IIT students, who don the hat of a tutor and help them with students such as Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science among others, through video conferencing and using a shared whiteboard. This acqui-hire will add a new element to LearnNext by offering students with a platform to access over 50 tutors.

The move, which is aimed at adding a human element to the product, will be launched in July next year. Students who subscribe to LearnNext will have the option of taking one-to-one sessions with tutors on the platform. Next Education previously acquired the robotics lab programme RoboLAB from ThinkLABS and InOpen Technologies, which gives the company access to their computer science product.

Next Education acquires InOpen Technologies

Hyderabad based Next Education has acquired Indian Institute of Technology; Bombay incubated startup InOpen Technologies for its K-12 computer science product Computer Masti. Computer Masti was created jointly by IIT-B and InOpen and has a series of e-books to teach computer science in schools.

This acquisition will scale Computer Masti and approximately three Million students will use CS 101 (basics of Computer science and programming) by July 2017. Computer Masti is a core computer science curriculum. It focuses on building life skills through computer science by emphasizing underlying concepts and not merely software specific skills.

After the acquisition, InOpen Technologies employees will move to Next Education. InOpen started with a seed capital of Rs 25 Lakh and got a boost when State Bank of India lent Rs 50 Lakh without any collateral in August 2010, while venture capital fund VenturEast invested $500,000 later. Founded in 2007, Next Education has catered to more than seven million students studying in their 7000-plus partner schools.