Ruangguru

Iman Usman is the Co-Founder and COO of Ruangguru, the largest tech-enabled education provider in Southeast Asia - serving over 20 million students, 300,000 teachers, with 4,000 employees. Along with his Co-Founder, Belva Devara, they started the company in 2014 in Indonesia and recently branched out to Vietnam and Thailand.

Iman’s contributions to youth empowerment have been recognized globally. Prior to founding Ruangguru, Iman was recognized as youth leader for its work founding and leading Indonesian Future Leaders and Indonesian Youth Parliament - some of the largest youth movements in Indonesia. He won the 2008 Indonesian Young Leader Award, the 2010 Global Teen Leader, the 2011 UN Youth Assembly Recognition on Humanitarian Development, Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 for Consumer Technology in 2017 and the Emerging Entrepreneur Award 2019 from Ernst & Young, among others. 

He graduated summa cumlaude from M.A. program in International Education Development from RColumbia University. 

Indonesia has the 4th largest education system globally with over 52 million students and 4 million teachers in its K-12 system. However, it is also one of the lowest performing. Based on the result of 2012 PISA scores in math, science, and reading, Indonesia ranked 62nd out of 64 countries. It is also worsened by the fact that Indonesia’s disparity in education is really high.

Ruangguru commits to providing quality education for the academic improvement of every student in Indonesia. Through technology, Ruangguru focuses on enabling access to quality education by:

• Accessibility: Ruangguru leverages the use of technology to enable wider access

• Quality education content: Ruangguru develops data-driven high quality content - using animation & motion graphics to teach concepts easier

• Affordability: 10x cheaper than minimum fee of regular offline tuition centers.

• Personalization: Ruangguru uses data to personalize student experience, enabling faster path to concept mastery.

Being one of the lowest-performing countries in education, measured by PISA, is something concerning for Indonesia with more than 52 million students in its K-12 system. According to the World Bank, over half of the teachers in Indonesia were not qualified to teach and that over 42% of Indonesian students performed below PISA’s average in math, science, and literacy. A study by Professor Lant Pritchett of Harvard Kennedy School highlighted that students in the capital city, Jakarta, would need 128 years to catch up with OECD countries. 

There are three key challenges that exist in Indonesia’s education system. First, the absence of data-driven policy making and intervention by the government. The only way that the government can check students’ learning progress is by the national exam, which is considered inaccurate due to the fact that it only happens once a year. Second, lack of quality teaching and content. Teachers tend to use the same materials over the years. Third, disparity in execution affecting students' outcome. Students’ outcomes have been consistently low from the disparity of quality in teaching by the teachers at school. These problems later widen not only in K-12, but also in the adults learning and higher education. 

Ruangguru is the largest tech-enabled provider in Southeast Asia - serving 20 million students, 300,000 teachers, with >4,000 employees across Southeast Asia. It caters various learning needs to K12 students, college students, professionals, and businesses through: learning video subscription (>40,000 animated learning video and >1 million question sets), private tutoring marketplace (300,000 teachers), tech-enabled offline tuition centers (15 locations), corporate training platform (used by >100,000 employees), on-demand certified skill-based training (>150 courses), among others.

Ruangguru is solving the problem through technology. Ruangguru’s strongest components are the high quality content and the AI-powered personalized learning. All of Ruangguru’s products can be used on our mobile app and desktop devices, making it accessible with minimum internet connection.

With the presence of Ruangguru, we hope to leverage data and technology to create effective and personalized content to every student, something that the government/public education system is unable to do now. Ruangguru also provides it at a scale through technology. This is important given the fact that Indonesia is a big country with connectivity challenges in different areas, resulting in the low teachers supply and quality of teaching. We hope that we can deliver solution to tackle the above mentioned key challenges in education.

Based on our internal data gathering, we mainly serve students who come from second and third tier cities in Indonesia, with more limited access to quality education. It is also estimated that 70% of our current subscribers have never accessed any tuition chains before.

With our affordability, we serve middle to middle-low income families in Indonesia, who do not have access to other supplementary education, considering the price per-year can be as high as 5x of their monthly income. Based on our research, we can estimate that 48.4% of users out of 20 million users have per capita income less than $5/day (considered below the average minimum wage). 

There are many efforts that we have done:

• We have over >200 education consultants spread out in more than 128 cities, visiting 20,000-25,000 schools annually to educate students to use technology and try our app to optimize their learning.

• We established Ruangguru Foundation - non profit arm dedicated to support public school teachers improvement, widen education access to underprivileged and marginalized youths, impacting over 500,000 beneficiaries in the past 3 years.

• We also continuously use creative marketing and digital campaigns to raise public awareness and educate people about our products and services.

Ruangguru helps to elevate the opportunities of every student in Indonesia through technology. Education is seen as a privilege in Indonesia, especially when the actual education system is dysfunctional and students need to have supplementary education to make sure they can understand what they are learning at school.

Ruangguru particularly caters to those with middle to middle-low income families because it provides quality education at affordable prices. 48.4% of users out of 20 million users have per capita income less than $5/day. We are glad to know that we have given the opportunity for them to have a quality education.

Ruangguru was a product of our personal discomfort. My Co-Founder and I were preparing for our Masters degree tests and we realized that it was difficult to find a reliable person or institution to help us. We saw an opportunity and created a reliable marketplace connecting tutors and students. We established the company and recruited some people to join despite having to go bootstrap for the operations. Ruangguru’s first business was a tutoring marketplace that helped students find the perfect tutor. Our business grew. We even developed some services to accommodate students’ needs, like tryout platforms, on-demand online tutoring, group-chat based learning, etc. However, we felt that we have yet to maximize the impact of Ruangguru. In 2017, Ruangguru introduced an integrated platform for students to watch thousands of learning videos, exercises with quizzes, and learn through infographic summaries. Ruangguru uses learning-based journeys, in which every journey is tailored to supplement a user’s learning experience, making it more exciting and personalized. This new product allowed Ruangguru’s significant growth, reaching more than 13 million users in 2019. In addition to its success in the K-12 market, Ruangguru expanded new business units, such as a corporate learning platform and offline learning centers.

I grew up in Padang, a small city in West Sumatra. I was the youngest child to a family of six children and the first person in my family to graduate from college. Though statistics deemed that I would be yet another child with no access to higher education, my parents instilled in me a hunger to go beyond the boundaries. I was considered relatively privileged in my hometown simply because my family could afford the $10 tuition for me to enroll in school.  I started hosting free classes to my peers who did not have the same chance. However, upon entering college, I was startled by the fact that only 40 students from my province were admitted to the University of Indonesia, one of the most prestigious universities in Indonesia. In contrast, several high schools in Jakarta would each send over 100 students to the University. It made me realize that the free classes I ran back home would not be enough change the system.

Witnessing inequalities inspired me to pursue a graduate study in Teachers College, Columbia University. The experience inspired me to explore the idea of delivering the best quality and interactive content for students through Ruangguru.

Both my Co-Founder and I are considered as well-respected young entrepreneurs in Indonesia, where we have the responsibility to bring good influence to the youths. With years of hard work and experience, our contribution and commitment to education and youth empowerment have been recognized on a national and international level. 

I received my B.A. cumlaude in International Relations from the University of Indonesia, where I was awarded the National Best Student Award by the Ministry of Education and Culture in 2013. In 2014, I completed my M.A. Summa Cumlaude, in International Education Development from Columbia University in New York.

Before Ruangguru, I co-founded and led some of the nation’s largest youth-led movements, such as: the Indonesian Future Leaders and the Indonesian Youth Parliament. I was also known as a key opinion leader in education and youth development. In 2019, I have just published an inspiring book, titled “Masih Belajar”, where I tell my life journey, which directly gets best-seller titles in Indonesia. I am also often invited to speak at national and international conferences: UN General Assembly, World Economic Forum, Solve at MIT, among others.

I am a living example of how education can change lives. My humble background did not deter me from creating products that democratize access to education in Indonesia, and becoming a leader of the largest tech-enabled education provider before 30 years old. I aspire to inspire the younger generation that with determination and persistence, anything is possible.

After witnessing the sad truth of disparity of education in Indonesia, one thing came to mind was to become a teacher. It was an obvious choice for me. I was very confident because I really prepared everything. I thought that with my experience, the process to become a teacher would be easy. However, after putting my best effort to prepare and sent out my applications to many schools, all of them rejected me. I was devastated, my dream to create substantial change through pedagogical method was crushed because, I thought, I was not good enough. 

The rejection became a lesson for me. I realized that I did not have to become a teacher to help students in Indonesia. I tried to find other ways to still be in the education sector and got accepted to Teachers College. I was committed to find an effective and scalable solution that can provide high quality learning yet at an affordable rate. Hence, while finishing up my degree in 2013, my best friend and I decided to start an ed-tech called Ruangguru, which literally translates to “Teacher’s Room". Ruangguru will not become something today if I had given up the moment I was rejected.

I have a clear vision towards how to build Ruangguru into the leading education player in the region by providing affordable, high-quality education content to the masses. I believe that with my experience, I am able to generate insights and understand how to balance both commercial and community commitments. My passion towards teaching has provided me with an ability to develop a better understanding of customers’ needs.

I have been an advocate and activist in the field of education from early-on. At the age of ten, I opened a library in front of my parents’ home to teach various subjects. In my spare time, I have published a book “Masih Belajar” (translate “Still learning”) was in the list of best-selling books and won Google’s Choice Book of the Year 2019.  I believe that my activism has inspired many young people in Indonesia to drive changes in their communities. 

During my study, I co-founded Indonesia Youth Parliament, the first-ever youth parliament assembly in Indonesia, aimed to educate and promote participation of young people in the democratic process. I also co-founded the Indonesian Future Leaders, a youth empowerment and youth leadership programs in 21 provinces, serving more than 22,000 beneficiaries. 

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Ruangguru commits to providing quality education for the academic improvement of every student in Indonesia. Through technology, Ruangguru aims to ease access to world-class educational content for students at an affordable cost compared to conventional learning methods. Belva and I wanted to solve a problem in Indonesia’s education system when we initiated Ruangguru. We were driven by the fact that Indonesia operated the fourth largest global education system, yet it was also one of the lowest performing. This dysfunctional system triggered a huge demand for after-school tutoring in Indonesia set high price points for their customers. We created Ruangguru as the solution, providing an affordable learning tool with quality content. Ruangguru’s price point is ten times lower than traditional offline tutoring alternatives. Ruangguru is the most comprehensive and reputable learning application in Indonesia. Ruangguru offers diverse products that compliments the Indonesian K-12 educational needs. It helps cover multiple gaps and drawbacks of the regular schooling system including transportation, financial, and motivational issues. Ruangguru positively uses technological growth and exposure among the younger generation in Indonesia to enhance educational incentives.  

Ruangguru has created some of the most innovative approaches of learning in Indonesia by using the learning paths consisting of high-quality videos, quizzes, and also infographics, carefully tailored by the best teachers and instructional designers to provide the best learning experience. When the product was launched in 2017, no other competitors had the same offerings. Ruangguru has created a new market of online tutoring platforms ever since.

Indonesia suffers from high disparities in terms of schools and teachers quality between urban and rural areas. Ruangguru can solve this problem through two kinds of activities.

First, we provide high quality education contents such as videos, quizzes, and infographics through Ruangguru app. We offer the access at lower price than conventional alternatives and make the products widely available across the country, even in rural and remote areas. More than 20 millions of students have accessed and used Ruangguru’s product to supplement their learning at school. In the short term, students are better prepared and motivated, resulting in better performance at school. Our evaluation of student’s learning from 1500 students in grade 1-12 showed that there was a significant improvement of student’s scores in mathematics (113% increase), Indonesian language (59% increase), and English (60% increase). In the long term, we expect improved learning for students in rural, underserved, and areas with lower quality education. Our projects that gave free access to Ruangguru products for 1800 high school students in 12 second-tier districts showed that these students had 7%-22% higher national exam scores compared to national averages. For the senior high school students, we expect an increased opportunity to be accepted in top universities. From the same evaluation, among the students who applied to top universities, 56% of them got accepted while the rest applied to private Universities.

Second, we provide teachers training to improve pedagogical, professional, and social skills. We make the training available to teachers in remote and underserved areas by collaborating with the local governments and private sectors. The outputs are tens of thousands of teachers that participated in the training in 93 districts. The short term outcome is the improvement of teacher’s competence which leads to long term outcome of improved student performance. Our evaluation in 1 program showed that the training improved the teacher’s competence score by 58%. In 15 districts, students whose teachers participated in the training also showed an increase in test score by 12 points for elementary school and 18 points for junior secondary school.

Additional Deck to Support ToC

Currently, Ruangguru is serving 20 million students in three countries, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. We aim to grow the number of our users and also to reach more countries in the next five years. In next year, we aim to serve 15 million more students after we are really confident with our operations in Vietnam and Thailand. We also aim to deliver lifelong learning services to more people in Indonesia, as individuals or even partnering with companies for our corporate learning platform.

Some of our goals for the next year and within the next five years are:

1. Strengthen our presence in Indonesia by releasing some of our newest products (learning management system) that can be used for free for teachers and students. This new learning management system is an all-in-one LMS package, with chat and assignment features that will give the best learning experience online. This is also necessary to have for the next one year, because almost 90% of the schools in Indonesia will still do distance learning at home until Covid-19 the situation gets better.

2. Socialize and work closely with schools in Indonesia to propose a bulk-buying plan for their teachers and students to use Ruangguru. Due to the distance learning situation, the Ministry of Education and Culture has stated that the school budget allocation fund can also be used to purchase learning materials and platforms to help with the online learning activities. 

3. Accelerate growth for our current two markets other than Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, for the next year, and expect to expand to more countries in two years. 

4. Contribute more to the society with Ruangguru Foundation, reaching out to those in need, disadvantaged teachers and students, and giving them training and access to our product to help support their teaching and learning activities. In order to scale the program, we aim to have more collaboration with private sectors, government, and also external donors.

These are some barriers that exist on our ways to accomplish our goals:

1. Market barriers → due to COVID-19, some of our overseas plans are being halted because we need in-person visit or meeting. 

2. Sales conversion → Pushing sales funnel from awareness to paid users → we need more creative ways to execute sales and marketing plans because the brand awareness is already high, but we need to push them as paid customers.

3. Uncertainty of school openings → As part of the sales plan, we usually schedule school visits to directly reach out to our potential customers. Last academic year, our sales team visited more than 25,000 schools. However, due to the pandemic and the government’s policy to close schools since March, there is no certainty when schools will be operating again.

4. Competition in the edu-tech market → Growing numbers of competitors is also one of the challenges that we have. A lot of emerging educational start-ups are going towards us by giving learning video content and similar experiences. Some of them even offer for free.

Here are some plans to overcome the existing barriers:

1. Market barriers, halted overseas plans: shift to desk research and distance interview with the representatives of potential countries.

2. Sales conversion, need to increase paid users: strengthen our salesforce team to tap into those potential customers who have not yet converted. We are also preparing a chatbot to help the customers answer FAQ, especially to help them with the product knowledge and payment process.

3. Uncertainty of school openings, cannot do school visits: Change it to online and webinars demo with the students and teachers.

4. Competition in the edu-tech market: Enhance our value proposition in which we offer high-quality content that you will not get with free products. More creative marketing efforts will also help in securing our spot as the #1 learning app in Indonesia.

We partner with a lot of organizations, but at the international level, we partner with Solve, Atlassian Foundation International, and DFAT. We have partnered with them since Ruangguru competed in the Solve Challenge in 2017, where we were awarded with 3 awards, Solver of MIT, DFAT Prize and Atlassian Prize. We work together to implement Ruangguru Digital Bootcamp, an initiative to support out of school youth in Indonesia to get employment and hence have a better livelihood. We developed a group-chat mentoring platform which allows the users to prepare for high school equivalent exams while at the same time providing employable training and connect them with employment opportunities. Realizing that internet data plan could be another barrier, we also supported the students with a USB On The Go, which allows students to access learning videos from mobile phones without having to connect with the internet. This year is our third year of partnership, and we have reached out to over 2500 disadvantaged youth, comprising those who come from informal learning centers, foster care houses, government supported training centers, and many more. We managed to improve the employability rate to 63% and increased the percentage of the students who continue to higher education. Both DFAT and Atlassian have also agreed for a 3-year partnership plan with us to scale-up the program to reach even more beneficiaries.

Only for the K-12 products

Key beneficiaries: K-12 students, alumni, parents, teachers.

Program: Providing education products for students in K-12 to help improve their grades and overall learning experience. Ruangguru app is free to download and can also be used on desktop version. Ruangguru can be accessed by millions of users simultaneously, making it accessible for anytime and anywhere without limitations.

Products: 

• Core product: a subscription-based learning videos, where students can learn from high quality learning videos, practice from question sets, and get infographic summaries.

• Other products: a group-chat based learning with standby tutors, private tutoring marketplace, online private learning tutoring service, and 21st-century tutoring center that combines online and offline learning.

Services:

• Dedicated sales team to educate potential customers and sell the products. 

• Dedicated customer service team to help with difficulties that may arise.

• Exceptional product team and engineering team who work hard to provide the best products based on customer’s needs.

• Creative marketing team who tirelessly execute various marketing efforts.

• Support team to help us run the business.

Ruangguru is well-received by the general public for its quality and affordability. The quality of Ruangguru has always been the core differentiating among the same providers in Indonesia. With high-quality products, we offer with an affordable price. For one year, the subscription fee for the learning video subscription is as low as US$37 (or around US$3 per day). We are creating new demand for the market and being the key player in the industry.

As an education technology start-up, we have been successful in creating a sustainable business through selling the subscriptions of our products. Our revenue has grown significantly in the last few years through a combination of maintaining a top quality product and driving sales and marketing efforts. With increasing adoption of online learning especially accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we also expect to see lowering costs to acquire customers which will help us in building a sustainable business. In addition, we have successfully raised up to Series C fundraising (December 2019) and we are backed by prominent private equity and venture capital investors. Moreover, for our Foundation, we continuously partner with donors and companies to keep running the social projects and scale up proven impacts that work. We are open for collaboration with various organizations who want to bring impact particularly in the education sector in Indonesia.

We have had a series of funding which some of them are undisclosed. 

• Undisclosed - Seed Round - Aug 18,2014
• Undisclosed - Series A - Dec 9, 2015
• Undisclosed - Series B - July 4, 2017
• Undisclosed - Series B - July 26, 2019
• USD 150 million - Series C - Dec 26, 2019

This is only a series of funding excluding undisclosed revenues and grants.

We are seeking to raise funds for our Foundation to help execute more social projects targeting those who are underserved and disadvantaged by scaling up the programs that are proven work such as the teachers’ training and students’ learning support program. We aim to make measurable impacts through our data-driven projects, hence the funding will be allocated to expanding our projects to reach frontier regions in the country with in depth monitoring and evaluation to assess the effectiveness of our programs. For $430 we can provide a 1 year comprehensive blended learning program for 1 teacher and 1 student. This cost already includes the monitoring and evaluation components that will allow us to iterate, improve the program, and deliver it to even more populations in the future. We wish to implement this program to the 10 most remote and underserved regions in Indonesia, with a total of 4,000 program beneficiaries (200 students and 200 teachers in each region). In total, we will need a funding of $860,000.

Undisclosed

I am interested in applying for The Elevate Prize because I see that this prize could bring positive impact to our company. As the current biggest player in the education-technology sector in Southeast Asia, I think it is also necessary for Ruangguru to be exposed to more global audiences. I cannot think of any better platform for us than The Elevate Prize. I am hoping to not only inspire more people with Ruangguru’s stories on how we help students in Indonesia to get the best quality education through technology, but also to get support and connection to the similar industry leaders and experts. The Elevate Prize can really help us in our plans to be a global player and also to enhance our position in the region as the leading edu-tech platform. We are also hoping that through The Elevate Prize, we can get support in terms of funding and mentoring with experts for our Foundation efforts. We already have various social projects that are running right now and impacting more disadvantaged students and teachers in Indonesia. With The Elevate Prize, I hope to reach even more beneficiaries, especially in the more rural and remote areas of Indonesia.

I am hoping for support in these three areas because those aspects will really help us to grow in the next years:

• Funding will be needed if we want to continue our social projects to reach out to disadvantaged students and teachers in Indonesia.

• Monitoring and evaluation will let us really understand the impact of our products and consistently improving our M&E approach.

• Marketing, media, and exposure will help us to add more credibility as an organization.

We are open to collaborate and partner with partners who are interested in education and also employability of youth.