While most education startups are pulling back post-pandemic, Qubits Learning (founded by De Paul Kannamthanam and Unnikrishnan Cheruprappan) is quietly scaling up with conviction. The bootstrapped STEM company, founded in 2008 and based in India and the UAE, recently acquired US-based Ellipsis Education, which has already been adopted by the school districts in five US states.
De Paul Kannamthanam, Co-Founder and CEO, Qubits Learning
The move is bold, but not rushed. Qubits spent the pandemic building a structured computer science (CS) curriculum focused on computational thinking, slowly testing it with schools rather than chasing quick growth. Now, with a strong base in the Middle East and a foothold in the US, Qubits is hoping to bridge a global gap in tech education—starting with how children are taught to think.
In a chat with THE WEEK, co-founder De Paul Kannamthanam breaks down how the deal came together, why American classrooms aren’t ahead on CS education, and what Indian edtechs often miss when they focus on scale over substance.
Q) Let’s look at the big picture: with so many edtech firms pulling back after the pandemic, what gave you the conviction to go against the tide and buy Ellipsis Education?
The pandemic was a boost for a lot of things. In fact, Qubits was born during the pandemic. You see, we’ve been in STEM education since 2008, building learning kits for schools in India and the Middle East.
Now, early on in 2020—just prior to the ChatGPT boom—the exponential rise of artificial intelligence also brought with it a substantial gap in the market because while everyone was talking about AI as this ‘next big thing’, no one was talking about computer science.
The thing about education, particularly school education, is that it moves extremely slow compared with the industry. If you really look at how schooling is done today, it is not too different from what it was like about 50 years ago, especially in subjects like Mathematics or English.
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Unnikrishnan Cheruprappan, Co-Founder, Qubits Learning
So, when the pandemic hit, we got a lot of time to retrospect: we understood that we were not the type of company to grow overnight, because education is not a sector whose impact or value can be qualified overnight.
Our goal was never just to deliver knowledge. We wanted to instil computational thinking: a vital skill that’s often overlooked. Computational thinking, abstraction, and structuring—these are all things that can easily help you with life as well.
We wanted to develop and deliver a curriculum with that as a core skill, and so, we slowly developed and refined our computer learning resources during the pandemic. Thankfully, during that time, schools were also more open to trying out new things. As we were (and still are) bootstrapped and self-sustained, we were able to refine our product slowly, in many feedback cycles over that period, to where it is today.
The reason we needed many cycles of feedback is because a child’s mind is a very complicated space, and feeding knowledge and skills into that space requires respecting that space and understanding what will help them be able to use that information in the future.
As a B2B company, we relied on word of mouth. Schools understood our vision and helped us grow.
Q) How did the deal come together?
When you do business with schools, they demand alignment with well-defined standards. Since computer science is a relatively newer subject, it has no clearly outlined standards in a number of countries. However, well-defined standards have always existed for a subject like Mathematics, which dictate the level of subject knowledge a kid should have at a specific age.
When we reviewed the education systems of various countries, we found that the US actually had specific, intelligible standards set by an organisation called the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) as far back as 2017.
So, we began with international American schools in the Middle East, with a view to one day reach the US market. Our curriculum was also US-based.
Being a global tech hub, the US was a natural next step.
By the time we established ourselves in the Middle East, we had almost a 50 per cent market share—almost one in every two schools—especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It was with that confidence that we entered the US, which is, however, an entirely different beast.
For them, who you are outside the US matters little. What matters is only your product, its viability in the US, and how stable you are as a company in an ecosystem where companies come, set up shop, and leave overnight. This is because school districts only adopt curricula when they can be sustained and updated over a period of time.
Ironically, we found that computer science education in the US lagged behind the Middle East.
There’s also the fact that teaching, especially for a subject like this, in the US is quite underpaid. This gap—not to mention the extremely prescriptive lesson plans teachers had there—was our cue.
Q) What did you see in Ellipsis that could complement your company?
The whole deal with Ellipsis happened in just a few months, really.
When we formally met its leadership to discuss a possible acquisition in February this year, we focused on our shared core belief in teacher-focused deliverables. You see, no matter how good educational tools are, they are nothing without a good teacher to use them right.
Now, we knew Ellipsis for a while before the deal negotiations began this year, and it was a legacy company with a curriculum adopted in five US states. That was what drew us to them: the fact that despite having a state adoption in five states, they did not have the reach that they could have had.
So, we floated the idea to Ellipsis, which was quickly burning through its cash reserves after failed attempts at building in-house tools. They were on board with the idea of merging our computer science (and AI) education tools and ecosystem with their reach and excellent teaching resources. And there you had it: the perfect marriage, really. Now even we can say that we’re adopted in five US states!
Q) How will Qubits and Ellipsis work together in terms of curricula and teaching styles?
We have already begun using their excellent lesson planning methods to adapt our deep-focus computer science to a varied range of learning levels. I say varied, because we not only have to tackle children with varying educational needs but also states with varying focuses on computer science. Indeed, the differences are extremely stark, because while schools in some states mandate a half hour of computer science per week, others have 120 hours per year.
Q) What lessons can Indian edtechs learn from you?
Well, we’re a developing company ourselves, but it is worth noting that edtechs should respect students’ time investment. Focus on the ed-first, and then the flashy -tech!
Q) Where do you see Qubits five years from now?
Look at companies like NVIDIA, Amazon, Meta, and Google. They dominate global economies, and yet, the K-12 computer education in their countries often doesn’t reflect that.
The need of the hour is a paradigm shift that leads to computer science being taught to its full potential, so as to match the needs of the industry. As we play our part in reducing the gap between the classroom and the industry, we sincerely hope that the education systems of the world assist us in that endeavour—or we risk raising a generation misaligned with tomorrow’s world.
