iNM Volume 7 | Page 29

iNM Magazine Volume 7 | August 2015 Cover Story EDVENTO FOR YOU! Shouvik Dhar Founder, Edvento IHow it all started accuracy, point out their areas of weakness and track their progress. Looking down the memory lane, I feel thrilled to see something I had conceptualized has grown into a really promising venture in a short span of 18 months. “Today Edvento is an open platform that I founded Edvento along with Nitin Pulyani in 2012. enables educators to create and promote courses and deliver them effectively to learners.” In early 2011, both of us started a premium MBA admissions consulting service www.thinkadmit.com. We also started getting frequent queries on GMAT preparation. Since we had already gained some experience in helping candidates in developing their study plan and understanding their needs, it made sense to go for upstream integration and provide GMAT prep service as well. A little more research indicated that admission consulting was only 10% downstream from all test takers. So, we decided to cater to this larger market. Jumping into Entrepreneurship The decision for to go entrepreneurial was majorly influenced by my 1 year at the Indian School of Business. The interaction with faculty, peers, the exposures that I had made me take a leap of faith into entrepreneurship. It was a little difficult for me to convince myself to do it as I had a background of government service. I had worked as a radar scientist for 4.5 years prior to joining ISB. My parents were way more than supportive of my decision and promised to back me up in any decision I took. They have been and will always be a source of inspiration for me. Hence, I never felt that I was taking a huge risk by not joining a job. Our love for technology and experience in having taken multiple exams became natural allies in providing a scalable product for test preparation. We picked up our books, we learnt programming and studied for exams. After more research in modern learning technologies, we conceptualized Edvento. We started Edvento as a adaptive learning platform for GMAT and GRE as a B2C offering. That was when (Aug 2012) we hired Saubhagya from Yahoo, who now leads technology. The platform generated a lot of interest from the test preparation industry and a few wanted us to implement a similar solution. That made