Class Saathi

I am Pankaj Agarwal, Founder & CEO at TagHive, a Samsung Ventures funded company based in South Korea and with operations in India. I am an inventor on over 50 international patents and was selected as one of the Top 10 Innovators in India in 2017 by MIT Technology Review and Mint.

Prior to TagHive, I was with Samsung Electronics where my decade long career spanned across several professional capacities – hardware circuit engineer, strategic innovation manager, and an advisor to the CTO of Samsung.

I am also the founder and Chairman of the IIT Alumni Association of South Korea. I am a trained magician and am fluent in Korean. I have a Bachelor of Technology degree in EE from IIT Kanpur, MS from Seoul National University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Over 5 Million students drop out from primary school in India to pursue low-income jobs. That's a huge loss of national talent and that is the problem we are solving for. We do that with Class Saathi - a combination of low-cost and easy to use bag of clickers and a mobile app.

Our offering does not require internet and enables daily formative assessment allowing the teachers and the administrators (school inspectors) to take corrective action on a regular basis. 

Our solution motivates the students to come to school and keeps the teachers on their toes to do a good job teaching in the school. 

If kids are well educated, they will create fortunes for their family, for their neighborhood and for their country thus elevating the humanity.   

Most of 150 million Kids spread over 1 million government schools in India don't come to schools because their parents strongly feel that kids don't learn anything in schools. Teachers face a huge problem teaching a class because learning profile of kids is so wide. Only 51% of students in Grade 5 can perform subtraction at a Grade 2 level. Drop-out rate of students from primary to secondary school stands at a whopping 38%. 18% of teaching positions in Indian govt. primary schools are vacant.

Class Saathi is a low-cost solution that can be used by schools even with no infrastructure. Class Saathi offers a 2-way interactive education that makes learning personalized. After a teacher teaches a concept, he or she can ask students some questions on Class Saathi app and the students can respond their answers using the clickers. The data gets collected almost instantaneously and helps teachers get a very good understanding of the comprehension level of the class before moving on to teach a new topic. 

Learning of each student is profiled and is available for teachers, parents and administrators to see on their mobile and to take any corrective action. Students will have more fun with the clicker, teachers will be more accountable for every class they teach and parents can rest assured that their kids are learning.

Class Saathi serves the primary school and secondary school going students directly. Indirectly, it serves their parents and their community because these students, if educated well, can play a big role in transforming their surroundings.

Class Saathi enables the teachers and students to come closer. Students can now be more self-aware of their knowledge limits and work on them. Teachers can now better understand which students need help and can ask those students to attend remedial classes to bridge the learning gaps.

We have done pilots in 2 biggest states in India and have done multiple iterations of the product to make it more user-friendly and meaningful.  

We "elevate" students on a daily basis through Class Saathi's easy-to-use formative assessment tool. 

I come from a small village in India which had no good schools. I was lucky enough to study in the best of schools globally. In 2015, I went to my village and was surprised to see that the schools in my village had become worse and there were so many students dropping out. The spark came from that visit. I then visited multiple schools in various parts of India and was surprised to see that conditions. I realized that there was no technology available for these village schools. No technology could help predict and manage drop out rates. That's how it all started.

I come from a small village in India which had no good schools. I was lucky enough to study in the best of schools globally. In 2015, I went to my village and was surprised to see that the schools in my village had become worse and there were so many students dropping out. The spark came from that visit. I then visited multiple schools in various parts of India and was surprised to see that conditions. I realized that there was no technology available for these village schools. No technology could help predict and manage drop out rates. That's how it all started. 

My educational background

Backing/Funding from Samsung Ventures

Good Team in India and in South Korea.

We did the first pilot test of Class Saathi in schools in Uttar Pradesh. Our app was then completely online. While the app worked in some schools, in most other schools, the poor internet connectivity made it very difficult. Teachers began to give us poor feedback and the students were not so happy with a slow system. The adoption of our solution was very poor. It was a tough time because my entire team had spent over 6 months building the product. And, we had failed. We collected all possible feedback and told the teachers that we would come back in 1 month. We went back to drawing board and listed our action items. In next 4 weeks, we had a complete offline (internet free) system and we began our 2nd round of pilot test, which was a great success. 

I founded the IIT Alumni Association of South Korea in 2014 to support the young IIT graduates who came to Korea from India and felt lost in a country where the culture, food and language was so different. We started with 6 members and today we are over 100 members. In the initial days, it was difficult to mobilize people because folks could not believe in my grand vision of making Korea our 2nd home. I continued to repeat my vision and shared action items that could help us achieve our vision. I was able to form a leadership team of office bearers and 2 years ago, I handed over the President's role because I wanted this association to be not reliant only on me. Today, I serve as the Chairman (a non-elected position) of the association. You can find more details on the association at www.iitalumkorea.org. 

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Class Saathi is a patented world-first clicker solution that works with a mobile phone app. The system is designed to work very well in offline conditions, something that is a must in low income schools. Also, Class Saathi is designed in a way that with just one bag of clickers, the entire school can be made smart. You can watch a video at  

Our theory of change is that if we are able to measure learning outcomes on a daily basis (instead of doing that once a month), we can expect a huge positive difference in the learning levels of the students.  

Currently : 100,000 students

In 1 year : 1 Million Students

In 5 years : 50 Million Students  

We make money by selling clickers (one time revenue) and charging a subscription fee for the app (monthly recurring revenue).

Samsung Ventures : Equity Investor / Invested US$450,000 

Enlight Ventures :  Equity Investor / Invested US$130,000 

Revenue : 

Clickers : US$100,000

To give more exposure to the work we do in our pursuit to transform schools in low-income societies.