PlanetSpark, a K-12 communication skills development company, plans to hire 10,000+ English teachers by 2022. On the platform, the company has over 2,100 teachers.
Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Dr Ashish Gupta, Gokul Rajaram, and Shirish Nandkarni were among the entrepreneurs that participated in a $13.5 million Series-B round headed by Prime Venture Partners in December of last year. The company intends to aggressively gain market share in the $82-billion worldwide communication skills market with the latest round of funding.
The 10,000 new teachers will help the company expand its footprint in India, the United States, and the Middle East and expand into other countries, including Europe and Southeast Asia.
“India has an estimated pool of 1.8 million potential English teachers. Every year, around 4,00,000 fresh candidates enter this pool in the form of English, communication and B.Ed graduates. This provides a unique demographic advantage to build a global communication skills market leader from India,” said Kunal Malik, co-founder of PlanetSpark.
Teachers can use the edtech firm’s platform to teach international students from the comfort of their own homes. They can choose any convenient time window during the day because the company caters to students from many time zones.
“The remote working revolution has made a massive impact on the teaching industry as well. We are witnessing a phenomenon where online teaching has become a serious profession. Top-notch teachers have adopted online teaching in large numbers and they do not want to go back to the traditional offline classroom teaching,” said Maneesh Dhooper, co-founder of PlanetSpark.
PlanetSpark was founded in 2017 by XLRI alumni and hostel roommates Malik and Dhooper, who have more than a decade of experience in the growth and scale-up of companies including Unilever, UrbanClap, and Novartis. So far, the edtech business has raised $17.2 million in investment.
