How CultureAlley's app Hello English became number 1 on Google Play store in India in just 8 months

JAIPUR: An office located on a glass partitioned terrace facing the sprawling white Birla Temple in Jaipur. This is where a group of young techies is trying to change the way India learns and speaks the English language.

Tech startup CultureAlley's Hello English, developed out of Jaipur, has become the No. 1 English learning and speaking app on the India Google Play store within eight months of launch.

The platform for the app was developed by a young couple, Nishant Patni and Pranshu Bhandari, just days before they got married. They had quit their jobs in Gurgaon and returned to their roots to Jaipur to follow their dreams.



It's an example of how even small towns can turn out tech success stories that can attract influential marquee investors such as New York-based Tiger Global Management, one of the early backers of Facebook that now counts Flipkart as one of its investments in India.

Flush with $6.1 million (Rs 36 crore) in funds from Tiger Global Management and investors such as Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital, Rajan Anandan and Sunil Kalra, the 17-member strong startup is attracting engineers from colleges in Rajasthan and IITs.

The idea of developing the language learning application came to Patni, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Kellogg School of Management, while he was in Shanghai on an exchange programme. "Belonging to a pure vegetarian family, as most Marwaris, I found it extremely hard to explain in Mandarin that I don't want any fish, eggs or even chicken broth – things considered veggie by the locals," said Patni, 30. After graduation, Patni returned to Gurgaon from Chicago to work in a Khosla Ventures-backed solar energy startup, but kept alive his dream of a building a startup of his own. He roped in fiancée Pranshu Bhandari, who left her job as an analyst at Pitney Bowes in Gurgaon, to start developing CultureAlley, a platform that would teach Spanish, Mandarin and English through games and quizzes. "We launched the platform in December 2012, just days before our marriage," said Bhandari, who moved to Jaipur to start the company.

The elders in this tourist town found it bewildering that the couple was up to something, unmindful of their marriage preparations. The couple did not even take a honeymoon and went straight back to their laptops after the wedding to work on the platform. "We told them we were building software. But for the ones who didn't know what software was, we just said we had started a business. All Marus (Marwaris) understand that," said Patni. A few linguists in Mandarin and Spanish were also enrolled online to help design the course.

In 2014, CultureAlley entered the global batch of 500Startups, the world's largest incubator, which helps new and startup companies develop. CultureAlley also changed its model from a website to a mobile-only version focused on English. "The startup has stuck with the essentials of CultureAlley while pivoting the medium of delivery (now mobile) and the market focus (now only India)," said Pankaj Jain, a partner at 500Startups.

"Small towns can definitely produce worldclass companies. Though the local support system may be lacking in smaller cities, costs are much lower and attrition isn't as much of a problem," said Jain.