How the EdTech Unicorns and Investment Scale Education Innovation in China

okay so good afternoon everyone thank you for coming to this session and thanks kala for the invitation and the organization of attack track so for this session we're going to focus on China so seeing very fast growth and investment in education technologies and innovations in China as as well as globally in recent years so last year in 2008 in China alone we've seen 3.5 billion u.s. dollars invested in China based education technology so today we have a very wonderful panel here that brings us the perspectives from industry leaders entrepreneurs and investors to talk about their experience and insights into how technology can transform education can improve learning can empower students and teachers so first of all please allow me to introduce the panelists very briefly so first we have Mr Tundra director of international cooperation and business development a new rental education Technology Group so new rental is the largest private education provider in China that has a comprehensive education offerings from offline class to online class from international schools to publish in businesses and next to John is mr. Chou - and co-founder of 172 a year or homework together which produce very good bottles anyway homework together is one of the largest digital homework and learning platform that has a user of more than 50 million students and parents they've raised their series around early last year that made them an attack unicorn so last but not least we have mr. belney from founding partner at blue elephant Capital which is an early stage at tech focused they've invested in more than 80 a zero at tech startups in China so far so let's give them a welcome of course so first of all I would like to ask our panelists to a bit of introduction about themselves and and how their products their services is innovating education and how they achieve very fast growth in out last few years so let's start with drunk as introduced I'm the director for international cooperations business department and main responsibility in one sentence is just to tap the high-quality overseas resources to support newer and host domestic growth and our services covering from H zero all the way up to 30 year old main in the growing parts of a person's lifetime although we are approached by some other partners saying that you should look to the the retirement for the senior citizenship because of the grain China's getting old before maybe before the carriage but obviously because we were already quite extensive and expensive and we believe we can't do well if we spread out too much so that's why I was still try to focus in the growth path between zero to three age of 30 occurring from kindergarten primary secondary international study and bilingual schools as well online offline so we started 25 years ago primarily for tester preparation at the time when China's foreign China's reform and opening-up there is a pent-up demand for Chinese the students who study abroad and hence new neuron was born I think normally when we look back obviously for a successful businesses obviously have to be in the right hand and doing the right thing with the group of right people and also have vision of course education either long-term eyes rather than is not shortened obviously 25 years ago are we looking no semen is quite short period of time but in a china market where one of the oldest when we was born there is no internet that's why we are in this transformation ward way up until today how we use technology to drive our education and our main competitors tal and their slogan is to technology driven company obviously we believe at the end of the day is online and offline there is no either-or actually it's neither old and no it's both obviously we believe that inspiration the human touch especially education is very important and then we are in the process of transformation stuff transformations quite hard for us to go because we are in an organization with 70,000 employees as massive organization so how you transform yourself yourself in face of the challenges and the detractor lamech and fast rapid market situation in China I think that's the challenge to New York as a as a wanda's Asian thank you I'm from it we used to be called the ec2 area which means home work together and now we've changed our name but I haven't had time to change my shirt yet now we called each attack which is educational technology together which i think is a perfect name also for this panel it's our vision is to combine education technology together to make a better world in better future and obviously a better future starts with a better education and we started with homework which is something that is used by all the teachers students and parents in k-12 ecosystem in China every day something like 160 million students do homework and he used to be kind of a painful and inefficient process totally based on paper repetitive questions fixed answers and no it's not interactive not individualized so we found this pain point and we offer the two initially two teachers to support them with a blended homework experience which is more interactive we individualized more interesting and we now cover something like 70 million users so since my last update to Sophie which required some 20 million more users and it's because we offered this for free and apart from offering this product for free we also have now over 1,000 people all over China doing teacher training for free because we believe teachers are the agent for changing education and we think that not technology is like wings for teachers they can it never replaces teachers it never replaces their mouths or their hands or their brains but it helps them transform their teaching experience so we now in this conference have at least 10 of the world's best teachers and I was in one of their classes earlier and I was so very impressed by this teacher from Georgia he was singing and dancing and all the room was filled with energy but I think it was kind of a shame that his class could only be shared by something like a dozen people in the room at one time but with the help of technology the best teacher can be shared across the world at the same time to millions even billions of people and the best content from all over the world can be shared at any time at any place to any student so that is our our vision and so now we change our name when we continue to expand what we do and we now have a platform that is hopefully forever for free to schools that covers the national curriculum the compulsory part of the elementary education for all the students and we also have a family platform that is a complement to the school offerings because we think Harvick who the schools are they cannot offer enough individualized educational content and services to the families and so on top of this using the data we collect and we collect over 1 billion learning data points every day we offer more individualized learning content and solutions to students outside school as an premium service and out of the 70 million users over half of users are now in third fourth and fifth years cities in China's there are six levels of tiers of cities in China and I think the less developed the cities are actually there is a bigger demand for our kind of services because there's a shortage of good teachers and good educational supplies such as New Oriental before in that city so technology plays even a bigger role in those in those cases so I'll stop here and I think China is a very interesting and very vibrant opportunity it's always been a country that respects education a lot but I think now with the introduction of technology there is a unique period of time for developed in China and I think that's the perfect way to exactly bill can you do it introduction of yourself and aunt xi yes my name is pew I'm from Glu elephan the capital or B capital unfortunately we are the youngest company here we started ourselves in 2015 so we do not have the priviledge to university in nura and hotel 1717 attack so if we have founded ourselves earlier we would have the opportunity our motto is very interesting we we risk money from established education entrepreneurs from china by far we have about 35 or 40 entrepreneurs or listed companies who are our limited partners and we use their resources and knowledge as well as money to invest in seed or NGO round of early-stage tech startups in the last four years we have invested in 75 we help these attack startups in cohorts we will start our seventh cohorts next Friday so I have to go back go back tonight and interestingly we the capital together with the resources have have done have done great good to those attacks perhaps in our first cohort we have allied for Institute called halala means drawing its valuation now is 150 million u.s. dollars now we have about 11 percent 11 percent of this company you know but we we only invested in about 2 million RMB s in this seed an end-around so we find the possibility of using capital to catalyze the development of early stage attack startups so we are very we are very optimistic in doing the in doing this more model continuously in the future we do about two cohorts easier the introductions to be short so P captain is blue Alton capital but is it also means building education with capital because we we see capital as a neutral staff capital can be a cataract quatre catalyzed in different in their interface as it has done in in transportation in technology and in energy and now it comes to in healthcare and in education so our mission is to building education with good capital or capital with resources or with patient resources who can stay with the attacks perhaps and to what whatever they can to help to help the startups to build very good products so our mission is building education with capital our our goal is to invest in attack startups and finally influence maybe 10 maybe a billion people on this planet that's what we do in China by far we always we are doing our business in China and we are only investing in R&B but we hope maybe in one or two years we can do some US dollar investment abroad thank you thank you very much so as our panelists have mentioned about human touch and teachers role and also in the morning plenary that mr. Sonny Markey has stated that attack is not technology but it's actually about education so as Don has mentioned about how your big data and learning and analytics where artificial intelligence can actually make possible like make the impact of one teacher actually bigger and stronger so can give us some examples of how your product and technologies actually enables that of course so I was in Qinghai Province in China last November and it's a very different climate from here it's a about four hundred four thousand five hundred meters above attitude is close to the Himalayas and this this particular town was the 99% Tibetan so was a town with the biggest percentage of a single ethnic group which is not hungry in China and I was the reason I was there was because I found one teacher who was using our product and and I had no idea how he heard about our product but I went there and obviously I had some knowledge of the data because I saw that he had an unusually small class of just two students and he was the leaving English homework for his students as something like 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. every morning so I went there it was something like three hours slide from Beijing to the capital city of Shanghai called singing and another hour of flight to issue from singing another city in Shanghai and something like eight hours of drive driving to reach 4,500 meters and when I was there so when I reached there the teacher came out to greet me with traditional silk scarf from Tibet and he said something that really surprised me he said you know I'm so grateful that you provided this service to us so I you know I asked him why and then he said perhaps in Beijing you are just a tool for teachers but here you are the only chance for our students to see the outside world and this is the best chance they have to change their lives and their family's destinies so he told me the story he's not an English teacher he was a politics teacher so he his specialty he studied Chinese University he was a kind of a politics the politics is composite subject by the way in Chinese schools and there's no English teacher in this school for 10 years for the last 10 years but he believes that to learn language to acquire the skills to for the students to communicate and see the world so it's not just you know learning about the letters and Grandma it's about learning a different way of thinking and learning to communicate and understand what it means to be human so he had this idea but he had no tools or no content and no knowledge of this language and by the way it also is required by the National Curriculum in China that all the students study English for at least nine years during the compulsory period of their education but this school had no English teacher so he found on our platform that there are these content like picture books and there are listening and speaking interactive exercises there are leveled readers there are writing exercises you know all these things for free to his students and he doesn't have to spend a lot of time on I'm learning the language himself so for example before English teachers you spend at least 10 hours every week marking the homework but he doesn't need to spend any time whatsoever so this interactive conversation with a act and we can not do totally open-ended conversation yet but we can do conversation for compliant topic for example just talking about food like ordering the restaurant and we can we can do this through technology there is a immediate feedback and personalized feedback we can also correct the pronunciation of the students so for example the computer will say welcome to do back and the student will follow and say welcome to Dubai and the computer will say welcome it means playing welcome not welcome to try again welcome and students are welcome and say welcome to Dubai and so it's a it's kind of an automated personalized system and that trains the students and it automatically gives feedback to the teachers the students and the parents and so they can see how they are doing and then we help the students who are struggling with easier content so they don't get frustrated and we help the students who are more advanced with more difficult more challenging content so they are not poor and all the students doesn't matter what their level is they find the more appropriate more personalized level for their learning and the teachers also they can they can contribute to our content with their own content but the system is learning the teachers behavior and we have found over the years that the best teachers tend to contribute the most so they are also the most studious and most active the teachers who were most willing to share and in technology sense they are the teachers who contribute the most data to our platform so we learn the most from the best teachers and those and we learn from all the best teachers from all of the countries so their knowledge can be shared to these teachers in qinghai province and just another word about teacher training so usually we have as I mentioned 1,000 people they are in something like 400 cities in China from first year City to 62 City but this time in Shanghai because it's 4,500 meters above ground we don't have offline staff there to train the teachers and I think the only way for our system to work is for the teachers to be trained first I don't believe in just throwing them advanced technological system and then suddenly they become better teachers I think they need to understand how technology can help them at the first place so we administered remote teacher training to live broadcasting it is something usually we do to our students so there are lots of students I think at this moment maybe a million students who take our live broadcast aid classes all over the country but in this case we use the same technology to do the teacher training so we had about one teacher training session every week from Beijing to Shanghai to help this English teacher with how better to use our system to teach their classes so this program has lasted for just under half a year now since since I went last November and now this teacher shared me with me a good news which is one of his students it was participated in one of the English competitions in across the province and he was a 3rd place in all of the province which was unbelievable for this school and he was invited to go to the capital city of Shanghai which is singing and it's the first time the student ever stepped out of in this small town and I told the teacher that if the student can continue to study on our program for a year or invite him to come to Beijing which is one of the dreams that student mentioned to me when I was in the city and I hope that maybe if he studies long enough one day we can invite him to come to Dubai and maybe the teacher to come to Dubai as well to share this experience of teaching and learning through a combination of thank you thank you for sharing this with us so I will turn a question to drunk because you have said that your aunt who's been there 25 years right and then now you've also invested a lot in technologies like artificial intelligence or so your online platform will be IPO soon so how how do you see the technology plays a role in in a strategy of company and how that benefits students and teachers how newer and who innovates itself in the new age of technology yes I think there is a consensus not only months to us sitting on a stage but also we've heard voices from many parts of the panel's that we acknowledge the the power of technology especially how we can effectively use this technology to empower the student to teach and not only effectively but also to the equity in education to reach in the rural areas as doing the companies doing and also near enter school I think we see many of the big companies the eye to eye to that I think the problem is whether you can do that continuously and you can evaluate the effectiveness and also with the dedication I think that's quite important and then you need to explore we talk a lot about AI and newer and tourism is set up it is owned a Institute in collaboration with many of the u.s. institutions and also top Chinese AI and the scientists I think we are all in for that we are exploring I think Chinese are very tech savvy I mean in general East Asian quite tech savvy and then how we can use that technology not for his own sake but really to see to evaluate to find a way I think is worth exploring we need to pay the prices along the way but at the end of the day I think as a son evacuation is a education and at the end of this all boils down to education these are all the tools we set up AI Institute and we open the arms to welcome all kinds of partnership and collaboration and once we have any make any breakthroughs we are more than happy to share our platform to any orderliness students and families but also other state schools as well and then we have our own for language learning and teaching we have an own set of a joint venture company with the leading Chinese speech recognition company to do that the electronic grading and also speech and spoken dialogue we're all doing that I think we're not the exception I think we are one of the team that really going for that we join the trend in a way but I think at the end of days really about your dedication the the long-term go to really for the benefit of students and also for the teachers because then I see I've seen that teachers really work really hard not only in classroom but it really of the classroom they do lots of paperwork and we try to find ways to relieve their burden to focus and all of this as doing the also mention the teacher is quite important that's why we just release the new slogan new oriented unit 20 past 25 years and chemistry loss of different kind of slogans but now we dwell on one slogan which is dear and who delivers the best quality of teachers we hope we can deliver the promise at the other day is the teacher and then we train the teachers through technology as well and we have a one campaign called a candlelight campaign really physical teacher go into the villages in a year we went to a hundred school across a hundred very poor poverty-stricken countries across China to really help them through technology through face-to-face instruction hopefully we can change but good thank you I want to shift the conversation a little bit to more to the growth and scalability because I would say like technologies an attack that gives us a promise of larger accessibility so I will turn to a bill so you've invested in a lot of startups how do you see the achieve fast growth and scalability of our company it goes very fast in general its we have we have 75 portfolio companies so we got some interesting figures so about over 90% of of them as you are still living or the the girl at a very rapid rate and about 60% of them have got next round of financing and 30% of them got a valuation of over 100 million RMB and about 10% we reach 100 million u.s. dollars so verily the valuation goes very fast the reason that we got rapid rapid growth I will give you an example like lalala lalala is a lie drawing class and now it has expanded to online online a home Joey I don't know how liberal liberal liberal liberal arts classes two keys aged from about 3 to 12 and it's good its girls is very rapid because originally when well when there was no online drawing classes like voila the offline training institutes are very scattered the largest training institutes has a revenue of only about 300 million army per year but with online and it's very scattered likes engine has its largest training training institute and beijing has one and a song i has one and other local join joint institute also exists but with online drawing the market can be more concentrated so i can give you a number as far allah has has users all all over about 31 provinces in China and even it has users from overseas especially the Chinese citizens working overseas and last year in the 2018 in June is it has only about it has only about 3 million army per month but by the end of 2018 it got a cash king of 20 million RMB per month it's a it's a very extraordinary growth rate it's all because they have a very good way of acquiring users using the we chart ecosystem they are very efficient in getting users from WeChat so they are not only their online drawing classes but also online liberal arts classes are expended at a very rapid rate you can do the math in in June it will it it is no more than 5 million casseon per per per month but in December is 20 million RMB per month it's increasing at a very fast rate that's one way that's one example of how online classes expand in in a gigantic market like China so that's one way I see technology has has technology or new channel of distribution has enable attacks perhaps to grow at a very rapid rate another interesting case is about another of our portfolio company called dimension robotics mentioned robotics is is a robot robot a robot company founded by Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate when he came back to China in 2015 he was alone of course with his classmates they were they were they were people's PhD candidates from Carnegie Mellon where who aware they were working in the same class with the founder of Boston Dynamics so when they came back they are trying to build a robot with very good motion intelligence is another way of AI because for a robot for a robot there are two kinds of AI wise motion intelligence to help them to move forward and backwards and to avoid obstacles some something like that another is a recognition artificial intelligence which enable the robot to see and to understand what was happening around around around it so dimension robotic was very good at motion intelligence so three years later they have been building a robot operation system and using this system to build a very affordable robot for universities and using their operating system and their robot the universities can give AI classes for college students last year 2018 the Chinese government has has set a goal for 300 Chinese universities to open a new new new course called artificial intelligence so dimension robotics robot and their curriculum are highly wanted by those universities now half of the 300 universities has using have using dimensional robotics product and curriculum to give artificial intelligence class and now they are expanding to to customer market and they are giving artificial intelligence class to college college students who have no chance of studying this of who are not in AI major because large AI companies like Xiaomi like pie too Alibaba Tencent are all in great demand of Engineering's who have basic knowledge of artificial intelligence so that's also very rapid growth company from our portfolio companies so to sum up all the all of our attack companies who have who have got great rapid increase of their very valuation has find a way of using technology to get a rapid thank you oh oh can we have like one one question from the audience to our panelists yes how is it that you are able to offer zeus to millions of people access to your platform thank you short answer to that is we grateful to people like bill yes so we started in 2011 and until 2016 we made zero revenue so for five years we were just expand expanding and just spending and I think by then we raised something like 135 million USD before having any revenue coming and it was all to invest in this free school platform which from a business perspective gives us traffic you teachers students and parents and also data you know because even in really huge internet companies like tenzin and Alibaba there is a shortage of learning data and we believe the central row of Education for sorry the central role of technology for education is massification and also personalization you can achieve massification really relatively easily but for personalization you really have to have an understanding of learning from a data perspective so about two years ago we started to monetize and it was through this personalized family platform that I mentioned and another reason we could offer the school platform for free for so many so long and hopefully forever is the marginal cost for an actual student is not huge so mostly it's based on product automated digital content and the cost for us is basically server cost and is quite tiny it's less than one dollar for one student for a year and I think this kind of business model works in China one because there is a possibility of capital and the other is because the families are really spending a lot of money outside schools so there's an estimated two hundred billion USD after school market mostly in forms of tutoring like offered by a new oriental but it's huge market so our thesis is that you know 20 years ago when your Anto started all of that spending went offline and even today I believe new rent I'll cover some time 5050 cities of line out of over 1,400 cities in China so there's a lot of grounds yet to be covered by any of Lang tutoring center and the other is even for cities like Beijing for a subject like drawing for example it doesn't make sense to have an offline Center for some geographical locations simply because there is not enough density of the families for this particular the amount but if you do it online there is a much better economy of scale so I think the one poor answer to your question is that there is a demand for families outside school and there's also a demand for upgrade inside school and we just worked out a business model and as a result and so far I can't say that is totally worked we are still on the verge of break even we haven't been able to make huge profits yet but I'm very confident and I believe we're the first company in the world to have offered this model like a free service to schools and premium personalized service to families but I think in other parts of the world this could work as well thank you oh do we have a question for last question yes thank you very much we see often I just want to know why do China start of don't often scale to other regions like Africa Europe United States because we see often that you you can scale Hardware stuff but software we don't see a lot thank you anyone wants to address this why not go yes ah short answer is a Chinese so huge for us to take and plus a new rental plus TL these two biggest very comprehensive I mean Maki share offer the only under five five percents quite fragmented and also we believe before we build up people were stronger we don't want to get that big so and the raw millions of students in China at threshold we haven't served them as well as we expect so I think we need to get our house in order before but of course and we my row is part of row so that's really to place any of our technology or assets or opportunities abroad we are doing that but not as far as though as broadly as we wish because at a certain amount of time Ionian had finite resources annuity you need to focus on what you do for the weekend thank you sorry the last question because we've already actually passed the time so thank you very much if you have any more questions come to talk to us after after session thank you

Channel: Global Education & Skills Forum

Views: 730

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Global Education and Skills Forum, Global Education and Skills Forum 2019, Varkey Foundation Initiative

Id: LXMOXufJhPM

Length: 39min 46sec (2386 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2019