ConveGenius Revolutionizes Personalized Learning for Bharat via AI-Powered EdTech

In India, the quality of education you receive is often determined by a single factor: your zip code. While the "cream" of 10 million students gets world-class schooling, the remaining 240 million children—largely in government or affordable private schools—face a massive equity problem. The digital divide isn't just about hardware; it's about access to quality, personalized instruction that can scale to the farthest villages of Arunachal Pradesh or the mountains of Kargil.

Enter Jairaj Bhattacharya, the co-founder and CEO of ConveGenius. A researcher turned entrepreneur, Jairaj has spent the last decade building a social enterprise with a singular, audacious mission: to teach 100 million children. By moving away from complex apps and embracing the simplicity of conversational AI, ConveGenius has created SwiftChat—a platform that has already touched over 150 million profiles and is becoming the backbone of India's population-scale education infrastructure.

The Genesis: From Singapore Research to a Mathura Garage

Jairaj's journey didn't start in a boardroom; it started in a lab at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. As an electronics and computer science engineer from IIIT Hyderabad, he was researching how to break the digital divide. This was 2010—the year the iPad was introduced.

"I was looking at the potential to get low-cost tablets into the hands of children to solve the education problem," Jairaj recalls. "In India, 70% of students are in government schools. Only the cream gets quality education. There was a real role for tech to play in solving the equity problem."

Driven by the potential for macroeconomic impact, Jairaj left Singapore. His co-founder, Shashank Pandey, quit his job at Bank of America. Together, they started out of a garage in Mathura—a low-cost base to solve for a high-cost problem. The first five years were a grueling search for Product-Market Fit (PMF), focusing on rural areas where connectivity was a luxury, not a given.

The Pivot: When COVID-19 Broke the Model (and Built a New One)

By 2019, ConveGenius had found success with CG Slate, a personalized and adaptive learning (PAL) software bundled with tablets from Samsung and Lenovo. They were in 1,200 schools, reaching half a million students. They were profitable and growing. Then, COVID-19 hit.

"Schools got shut, and we were back to zero," Jairaj explains. "The devices were in schools. At home, children only had their parents' phones."

Facing a crisis, the team made two bold moves. First, they refused to do layoffs. Second, they acquired Gray Matters India, a leader in the assessment space. They realized that you can't treat a patient without a diagnosis; similarly, you can't teach a child without knowing their current level in math or language.

The "WhatsApp" Aha! Moment

The breakthrough came when the team asked: What is the one app everyone in Bharat already knows how to use? The answer was WhatsApp. They built a simple assessment bot where a child could say "Hi," and the AI would respond with math questions.

The results were staggering. In Himachal Pradesh, they launched Har Ghar Pathshala. In just three days, the bot reached half a million users.

"It took us seven years to get to half a million students with our school-based product. The WhatsApp bot did it in three days. It actually broke WhatsApp's business API because it wasn't built for children learning through an AI bot," Jairaj notes. The completion rate was a near-impossible 99%.

SwiftChat: Building the "App Store" for Public Good

While WhatsApp proved the concept, its technical limitations (rate limiting and API throughput) couldn't handle population-scale education for 100 million children. ConveGenius raised institutional funding to build SwiftChat—a dedicated messaging platform for "AI for Good."

SwiftChat isn't for peer-to-peer chatting. It's a platform for User-to-AI communication. It hosts bots for homework, teacher capacity building, and even non-educational use cases like utility bill payments.

With the advent of Generative AI and LLMs, SwiftChat has become even more powerful. Children are now interacting with AI avatars that act as personalized tutors, providing remediation and encouragement in real-time.

The Future: Outcomes Over Infrastructure

In a landscape where many EdTech unicorns are struggling, Jairaj remains focused on learning outcomes. He believes that "Technology First" organizations are just infrastructure players; "Education First" organizations are the ones that survive because they deliver real results.

"Outcomes become a key part of EdTech. Those unable to deliver learning outcomes will have to diversify into technology companies to survive," he predicts.

Key Takeaways for Entrepreneurs

The story of ConveGenius is a testament to the power of persistence and the importance of solving for the "Last Mile." By turning a smartphone into a personal tutor, Jairaj and his team are not just building a startup—they are building a more equitable future for India.