How This Hyderabad Person Lifted His Start-Up From Skilling Youths To E-Learning To Educational Institutions

Ananth Rao has an experience of twenty-two years in mobile and internet space career. In this industry, Ananth has traveled his journey from being the co-founder of JP Mobile in 1997 to serving in Motorola APAC by 2008. Basically, JP Mobile is a company that provides enterprise-grade wireless services.

In the last decade, this Stanford alumnus turned his mind to angel investment and start-up ecosystem of India as well as education and skilling the youth of India. In 2008, Ananth quit Motorola and set up Focus Ventures which is backed by SkillPro, a Hyderabad based social enterprise that had an aim to skill 1,000,000 plus underprivileged youth in India. Further on, in 2013, Ananth took charge as the chairman of SkillPro.

When the skill India's mission took place, SkillPro transformed its working method from offline skill training to e-learning solutions. Within 8 years, it benefited 300,000 plus youth across rural and urban areas of India and placed them in jobs.

Ananth says, “The course completion rate was just four percent. We wanted to make digital skilling and training more effective, and compel people to use the application. We looked to build a platform that would offer the security of content and ease of access. We launched iShiksha [an e-skilling platform] in 2018 for enterprises to skill their workforce.”

In the last two years, iShiksha serviced many companies like Swiggy in order to give training for the delivery personnel. Even iShiksha provided its service to the government of Andhra Pradesh and Kerala for providing free job skills to youth and others. in 2020 iShiksha was rebranded and relaunched as mPowerO with a hundred times larger and timely vision.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown on educational institutes is not likely to get over soon, this gave a boost to e-learning and online classroom. In May, SkillPro rolled out mPowerO to enter in this niche.

Features of mPowerO

Basically mPowerO is a SaaS-based learning management system (LMS) which assists educational Institute in helping them in delivering course content and training to the students just on the mobile app.

One of the most interesting features of this app is that mPowerO supports all the content formats like- PDF, HTML, image, videos, and interactive media. This app is students and teachers friendly.

“If one can use WhatsApp then I’m damn sure that that person can easily use mPowerO.”, said Ananth.

Institutes can schedule classes, tests, assessments, and faculty can track student progress within this app.
Schools can build their personalized apps by using its cloud-based SaaS solution. Lessons of every particular school is protected with platform security. Lessons can be downloaded within the app and can be accessed without Internet connectivity whenever the user wants to open those lessons.

mPowerO comes with a video conferencing integration also within its solution. For this, schools have to pay charges on a SaaS model per user per year.

Growth Plans 

mPowerO has tied up with a dozen K-12 schools in Hyderabad which includes top schools like Rockwell International School. It also conducts pilots with Telangana and Andhra Pradesh government.

“Offices and sales teams have been set up in Delhi and Mumbai to push the adoption of mPowerO. It is also in talks with the governments of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, and Maharashtra for conducting pilots.  With our current plan and funds, an unlimited and infinite percentage of growth can happen.” Ananth further stated.