The global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic saw major economies around the world driven to a halt. Lockdowns, quarantines, and travel restrictions reshaped millions of lives, all in a vain attempt to control the spread of the disease.
While no sector has emerged unscathed, it’s become clear that the businesses best equipped to handle the situation were the ones that had embraced digitisation. These early adopters leveraged their technological head start to remain operational throughout this period. As a result, they were also the first to recover once the global economy found its feet. Nowhere has this paradigm been more apparent than in the education sector. Educational institutes have long been at the forefront of the shift from the brick-and-mortar model to the virtual space, aided by the technical expertise of advanced ed-tech businesses.
Unfortunately, no similar fall-back option exists for the training and coaching industry. Comprising millions of enterprising individuals, they offer their expertise in fields as diverse as corporate training, tutoring, fashion and styling, yoga, fitness, video and sound editing, and countless more.
Thankfully, recent years have seen the rise of a new generation of apps and services that better enable these entrepreneurs to create, showcase, and market their services online. Here are four ground-breaking companies building a digital future that’s universally inclusive:
- Spayee
Spayee is an end-to-end white-labelled course platform which aims to empower educators and trainers. By providing content creators with the tools they need to conceptualise, market, and distribute their content securely, Spayee seeks to directly address and overcome the longstanding pain points of Indian course creators. Spayee was founded in Noida in 2014 by the four-person team of Sandeep Singh, Gourav Kakkar, Aniruddha Singh and Vijay Singh.
Spayee offers its users an end-to-end course platform, combining in-built marketing features, engagement tools, and the ability to design and launch custom-built websites and supporting mobile apps under their own brand name. Today, Spayee has over 1,000 pan-India customers and has helped them generate over INR 200 crores in revenue through the sale of their courses.
- Plixxo
An influencer marketing platform that caters to both influencers and brands, Plixxo was launched in 2017 by POPxo founder Priyanka Gill. Plixxo provides bloggers, stylists, YouTubers, and fashionistas with a platform through which they can easily engage with brands for collaborations and tie-ups. Simultaneously, Plixxo’s unique algorithm automates and simplifies the process of verifying their profiles, reach, and stats. This affirmation of their credentials encourages brands to reach out to them and streamlines the entire influencer marketing field.
Plixxo is currently home to over 26,000 influencers and has worked with brands such as Nike, Cadbury’s, Jabong, and Puma.
- VConSol
Vconsol is a fully Made in India video conferencing software, developed and launched by Techgenstia Software Technologies as India’s answer to Zoom. A product of the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology’s Digital India campaign, VConSol was launched this August after being chosen as the winner of the competition by a specially assembled jury of experts.
VConSol allows over 100 people to attend a video call simultaneously, while over 300 can attend a conference. It also offers a heightened suite of security measures – its AES-256 GCM encryption supports the largest bit size, making it amongst the strongest in the world. Vconsol is currently only available to a limited selection of personnel within the Government of India, with plans to make it available to the general public in the works.
- Zoho
Zoho is a software development company which offers a suite of online productivity tools and SaaS applications to B2B and B2C clients across the world. The company’s flagship product is its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, which combines sales and marketing, powerful integrations, and secure cloud storage in one package.
2017 saw the launch of Zoho One, an operating system designed to help small businesses run their entire operation through the cloud. This OS combines 35 web applications and an equal number of mobile apps under a single sign-on, offering micro-enterprises unmatched control over every aspect of their company. Founded in Chennai in 1996, Zoho has amassed more than 50 million customers globally by 2020.
