7 Oct 2020
WhiteHat Jr: Making kids future-ready with tailor-made courses on coding skills

    WhiteHat Jr was launched in 2019 by Karan Bajaj, a startup which offers artificial intelligence courses for children aged between six to fourteen years. The startup’s focus is to enable children to grow and evolve as creators and inventors of the future world.


    The founder believes that any job which does not involve creativity as the sole driving force is bound to be automated shortly. On the flip side, schools fail to provide their students with the necessary tech curriculum that they deserve. To bridge the gap, the startup has set out to establish the world's first dedicated coding curriculum for the students which is delivered via a live platform that connects the students and teachers.


    Till date, 700,000 kids have registered themselves with the portal and more than 7,000 classes are conducted daily.


    The product


    The curriculum provided by the portal has been divided into four broad categories- beginner, intermediate, advanced and professional, targeted at different age groups.


    The beginner curriculum is focussed at Class 1 students which involves building apps through logic and abstraction, with the help of phonics, mathematical operations, composition and units of measurement. The intermediate course teaches kids from Class 2 and 3 to build advanced art and single-character games through Blockly. This will aid them in deconstructing complex fiction and narratives and broadening of reasoning and understanding capabilities.


    The advanced curriculum is targeted at kids from Classes 4 to 6, where they learn to implement logic and abstraction to experiment on commercially-available platforms and apps with UI/UX interface. The professional curriculum trains students from Classes 7 to 9 where they are taught to build complex, advanced games and apps with the help of software like P5, Java and other programming languages.


    Till date, the platform has over 20,000 paid subscribers within a year of its launch.


    The cash


    Whitehat Jr reported $40 million in revenues since its inception just the previous year, with a monthly growth rate of about 30 to 40 per cent. Its revenue model is based on subscriptions. Students have to sign up for a free trial class, following which, they will have to take paid classes, which ranges between INR 650-750 per class.


    The course levels are priced at INR 5,999 till INR 1,79,999. The average ticket size for courses is INR 37,000.


    Till date, Whitehat Jr has raised $1.3 million as a part of initial seed investment from Nexus Partners and Omidyar India. In September 2019, it received $10 million in a Series A round led by the existing investors. It currently competes with tech startups like Byju's and Vedantu.


    Conclusion- The future


    WhiteHat Jr is looking to establish an international footprint. Earlier this year, the company launched its portal in the US.


    All its classes are conducted live and one-on-one. It also plans to roll out a 1:2 model which will help in lowering course prices considerably and enable more students to come onboard. It also plans to introduce newer programming languages such as Python for Classes 10-12 and college students.