From failing to crack IIT to assisting aspirants, Aditi Avasthi’s ed-tech startup Embibe is all about helping students

The startup has received a total of 590 crores since February 2020 as funding from Reliance Industries

In the era of digital learning, teaching several thousand students via audio-video classrooms has become a business but what teachers fail to understand is as to how will a student’s weakness be identified by the teacher in such a setup.

Aditi Avasthi identified the problem since she went through a similar phase after not being able to get into the IITs because of her not so amazing chemistry skills and no teacher in sight, to help her fix the problem. In fact, since Aditi could not crack the IIT’s, she went ahead and pursued an MBA in Chicago and worked for several popular firms like Barclays, Ben and Co., etc.

While Aditi had several other options abroad to explore her career options further. However, she decided to come back to India and in the year 2007 toured 15 Indian cities, meeting with teachers and students from coaching classes, which made her realize that it was not the right way for students.



It is then when she established the online test preparation portal Embibe. It was in December 2013, when her venture got funding of Rs.24 crore from Kalaari Capital and Lightbox Ventures. In fact, in April 2020, Reliance Industries invested a whopping Rs. 500 crore on the ed-tech startup

Now, there are over 3 lakh students who take the Embibe online test. Embibe has a team of 70 analysts, who after the test give a detailed explanation to students regarding their weaknesses along with ways and methods to make them right.

As per Avasthi, while coaching centres end up charging about a lakh rupees, Embibe does the same in a third of the amount. In fact, since there is no classroom involved, the cost is way less.

The test will be soon made free of cost and there will just be the analysis fee for students to pay. In fact, she is also planning online tests for students from Class 8 to 10. As per Aditi, the analysis by Aditi for JEE students has an accuracy of about 92 percent.