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