Mahindra University’s e-Hub incubated e-Learning start-up Widhya, is now a part of the fastest-growing startup and innovation ecosystem in India, T-Hub. Widhya is an e-learning platform for students to get industrial experience without having to work at a company. Widhya partners with various organisations, takes projects from them and puts it out for its learners to solve. What is interesting is that, this isn’t traditional video-based approach that has been adopted by a large number of e-learning players. Widhya is India’s first real gamified platform for e-learning.

“We are happy that a start-up incubated by us at Mahindra University is winning accolades and is now being mentored and fast-tracked by T-Hub. We at Mahindra E-hub help students bring out proof of concept, mentor the students and showcase their strengths and opportunities to industry experts, mentors and investors. We work closely with startups to bring them to a critical mass at the beta phase with testing and trials, so that they can take off with ease once they get to the stage of formal launch. We are glad that in a short time, we’ve been able to help many startups and each success story motivates us to go far”, says Dr. Yajulu Medury, Vice-Chancellor, Mahindra University.

Set up by two College room-mates, who had graduated in 2018 from our B.Tech. programme of study at Mahindra University, Widhya was born out of the need to undertake industrial training of choice, irrespective of the area of the background or specialization. Rahul Arulkumaran (B.Tech.– Computer Science & Engineering) and Rishabh Singh (B.Tech. – Electrical and Electronics Engineering) hit upon the novel idea and they conducted offline trials to validate the product immediately and found that this product was indeed the need of the hour.  Both the founders had plans of doing their masters. However, when COVID struck, both of them knew that now was the time for developing the product and they decided to postpone their plans to go for masters.

They got their online Minimum Viable Product (MVP) out in March 2020 and were in private beta testing until October 1st. Till October they had just 679 users but since then have more than 7000 users, out of which more than 40% are active each month. They have already been named as one of the “Top 10 Fastest Growing E-learning Start-Ups in 2021”. The student profile is that on the one hand, students from top IITs, IIMs, NITs, IIITs and BITS actively use the platform and on the other working professionals at Amazon, Google, Adobe, E-Kart, etc. are also active here. The Widhya platform is already being referred to by many training institutes to help them gain real-time industrial exposure and over 1,00,000 project hours have been recorded on it.

Widhya has users from India, USA, UK, Singapore, Vietnam, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Australia and many more and over 10,000 students have used its core platform for learning programs, live webinars, and internships.

“Over 500 students have already received internship experiences through Widhya and other partner startups and we are now launching a new program in January, 2021 called the “Winternship Program” which is India’s Largest Tech Internship Program in 2021 with over 5000 learners expected to participate. One of the main reasons for our popularity is that we are India’s first Real-Time Gamified E-Learning Platform”, says Rahul Arulkumaran, CEO & Co-Founder, Widhya.

Widhya is also a part of the Y-Combinator’s Startup School (Y-Combinator in one of the world’s most renowned investment and startup mentorship organisations – Top companies like Airbnb, Razorpay, etc. are YC startups).  Widhya is a completely bootstrapped company with no external investments – It generates revenue on a monthly basis to keep going and is profitable too.  Widhya was also a part of the “Google Cloud For Startups Program” earlier, through which they received some support from Google Cloud Platform.