Deep Eigen, an online education startup, has raised $250,000 from a US-based investor.
Deep Eigen was previously an internal education system at Swaayatt Robots. Its purpose was to let the team acquire the knowledge to be able to do cutting-edge research and keep up with the state-of-the-art in respective fields. This is the same spirit in which the founder is running Deep Eigen today. It is now a separate startup altogether, a 3.5 months old company.
The funds will be primarily utilised to develop new courses and hire the instructors and the teaching staff, including teaching assistants and video processing staff.
“We are going to spend a small part of the fund in open-R&D, which will help us develop courses covering state-of-the-art content for our future courses, for example, in the areas of deep learning, reinforcement learning and robotics (drones and ground) in general. We are also going to scale our platform to handle significantly many more registrations and add significant new features on the platform, including a backend AI/NLP engine for a better user interface,” said Sanjeev Sharma, Director & CEO, Deep Eigen.
He further added: “We are going to expand to several streams of engineering, science and applied mathematics, and that is where we will be investing part of the funds in hiring qualified lecturers and teaching staff to expand to the areas in which we offer online courses.”
Idea behind
Deep Eigen is an online education startup and provides courses that are typically significantly deeper than other online courses or the MOOCs offered by universities worldwide. For example, the startup provides courses in 3 categories: IA, IB and II.
- Category-IA courses are equivalent to a one-semester graduate program course on the same topic at top 10 universities in the world, with additional emphasis on industrial relevance and/or research.
- Category-IB courses are equivalent to a one-semester course being taught on the same topic at top universities (for example, during a graduate program).
- Category-II courses are typically a lot deeper and broader than any other online course. They do not cross the level of the top 10 graduate programs’ courses in Category-II in theoretical depth, but often this boundary is blurred and depends on an instructor. Category-II courses also focus on state-of-the-art when covering any topic as a part of the course. Also, at present, category-II courses (RO-1.0X, 2.0X, CV-1.0X) are typically much deeper than graduate program counterparts taught at typical MS or M Eng programs in the US – based on the beta users feedback (beta users from — New York University, CMU, Oregon State University, etc.).
Every year, lots of students leave the country and go abroad for MS/PhD or commercial MS/M Eng programs. This is done to bridge the wide gap between the knowledge one could acquire while being in the country and what is actually required to work in the respective fields at large. However, not everyone can get to graduate schools abroad — they are limited and expensive as well. Moreover, the colleges’ fee is rising every year, whether in India or abroad. Thus, the startup aims to make cutting-edge education sustainable.
Talking about the future plans for the startup, Sanjeev said, “We are going to expand to a team of 20 in early 2022. Future plans include offering complete degree programs as well online. Our courses are being taken in India, the US, Germany, and Japan. We plan to build a strong presence both in India and abroad, offering education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.”
