Amazon India, which had forayed into the booming edtech marketplace in India in 2019 with its JEE Ready app for IIT JEE coaching for students and later rebranded it as Amazon Academy, on Wednesday announced its launch. However, the service continues to run in beta mode. Amazon Academy delivers class 11 and 12 students IIT JEE courses along with all India mock test series for entrance to engineering colleges. With Amazon Academy, Jeff Bezos’ firm competes with the likes of Byju’s, Unacademy, Toppr, and other major Indian edtech startups assisting students with IIT JEE preparation.
While the courses are presently offered free of charge of price on its web-site and the Google Play shop, but it is only “for the next few months only. Amazon Academy reserves the right to terminate access to the free content at any time,” the firm stated on its portal. The app is presently not offered for iOS customers. Amazon Academy stated that it will give JEE preparatory sources “at launch” like mock tests, more than 15,000 concerns with hints, and detailed step by step options for practice.
“Our primary focus has been on content quality, deep learning analytics and student experience. This launch will help engineering aspirants prepare better and achieve the winning edge in JEE,” stated Amol Gurwara, Director, Education at Amazon India in a statement. Students will be in a position to track their progress more than time and get detailed insights into the all round test-taking approach.
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Amazon has been strengthening its all round play in the edtech segment in India. Its on-demand cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services had launched its accelerator programme for edtech organizations known as AWS EdStart back in 2018. The programme is “designed to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud,” according to the accelerator’s web-site.
Indian edtech marketplace saw investments up by 300 per cent in 2020 on the back of the pandemic and the following lockdown. The segment had secured $2.22 billion funding in 2020 up from just $553 million in 2019, according to report by the Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association and PGA Labs. The education marketplace, as a complete, was worth $117 billion in India with about 360 million ‘learners’ with key education comprising 66 per cent of the invest followed by 27 per cent coming from secondary education.