How one website hit the global top 90k in three weeks: a training company's move, and the white-label education cloud business behind Fermion
What it is A white-label back end for training companies: live classes, anti-piracy video, a browser coding environment with automatic judging, proctoring, and a learning system, all under the client's own brand.
Why it took off Major client ExcelR moved 653k active learners onto it. The India academic-year start in 8–September amplified the traffic, and since all clients' subdomain traffic is booked under fermion.app, the volume piled up in one place.
CHow you could follow Pick another region (the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America), serve only technical training programs, and offer "one back end to replace HackerRank + Zoom + the legacy system." The founder personally wins clients through networking and case studies, one by one.
Global rank 87k · 90 days ago, top 1M+
Fermion's global ranking was 1M+ places down 90 days ago, and now it's ranked #87k. It looks like a product that suddenly got discovered by lots of people, but it isn't. It's a white-label back end sold to training companies. One major Indian client moved over 600,000 learners, and it landed during India's academic-year start, so all the traffic got credited to it. This piece explains what it sells, where the traffic came from, and whether this business is worth copying.
A migration record
Fermion's website has a customer case study about the Indian training company ExcelR. ExcelR runs career courses in data science, project management, and AI, and also runs partner programs with Indian universities and colleges. It used to run on an old learning system called Edison. Enrolling students and opening courses was done by hand, coding exams borrowed LeetCode and HackerRank, live classes relied on Zoom, and any feature request took two to three months.
The case study says that after moving to Fermion, "95% of the data has been migrated, and it now serves 653,000+ active learners." For the university programs, "38 classes ran in a day, without Zoom." Coding tests run directly in the platform's built-in coding environment, with automatic grading and proctoring.
Open ExcelR's learner portal, mylearning.excelr.com, and the page carries ExcelR's branding, but it's Fermion underneath. The domain points to Fermion's servers, and over a hundred images and scripts on the page load from fermion.app's storage subdomain (11-07 checked).
How the ranking jumped
In the global site ranking (Tranco, averaged over 30 days), fermion.app was outside the top 3M before Sep 1. It hit 10 on Sep 516, 17 on Sep 225, 1 on Oct 110, 7 on Oct 86, and has stayed between 8.6 and 88 since (11-05 is 86,691). The curve jumped up one step and then flattened; it didn't rise steadily. The ranking lags real traffic by a week or two. Working backward, the real volume climbed sharply in the second half of August.
Chrome's real-user data (monthly) makes it clearer. Through 5 to July, fermion.app ranked only in the top 500k in India, and its most-visited subdomain was another client, quickinsure.fermion.app. By August it had jumped into India's top 10k and the global top 50k, and the most-visited subdomain became excelrv2.fermion.app, ExcelR's learner portal. In September it reached India's top 5 thousand, and the Netherlands also entered the top 500k (ExcelR has business there).
8 through September is exactly when Indian universities start the academic year, and ExcelR's university programs launched at the same time. The ranking also merges traffic by root domain, so subdomains and static assets for all clients under fermion.app are credited to fermion.app as a single entity. This curve therefore reflects "one major client plus the academic-year start," not Fermion independently attracting a large new user base. I'm fairly confident in this reading.
What it actually sells
Fermion offers training companies a full back end under their own brand and domain: live classes (two-way interaction, claiming 10k concurrent users at no extra cost), download-protected video on demand, a browser coding environment with automatic judging, exam proctoring, a learning management system, and WhatsApp marketing. The site used to benchmark against Teachable and Thinkific at "from $199 a month" and pitched a free start. The pricing page is now gone and only "book a demo" remains, so it's an enterprise, sales-led business.
This stack didn't come from nowhere. Founder Mehul Mohan built codedamn in 2020, while still a third-year university student: a programming course site where you write code in the browser as you learn, backed by investment from Antler and Goodwater. The in-browser coding environment, judging system and livestreaming were all infrastructure codedamn built for itself. In mid-2024, the team packaged these and sold them to other training providers, rebranded as Fermion. The Product Hunt launch got 2024-11-29,282 votes and lukewarm reception.
Where the clients came from
Almost entirely sales and networking. The client wall lists more than twenty companies, mostly Indian coding and IT training outfits: Kodnest, Learnbay, Tap Academy, Vedam, GenSpark, LearnYard. Mehul himself is an Indian coding YouTuber, very active on X and LinkedIn, and he has appeared on Learnbay's interview show. The circle is small and the founders know each other, which I infer is the main reason it could win these clients.
Two supporting channels: the official blog has comparison posts like "Teachable vs Fermion" and "Classplus vs Fermion," which capture traffic from "X alternative" searches. I found no ad spend (not finding it doesn't mean there was none).
What made ExcelR pick it: one platform replaces the old LMS + HackerRank + Zoom. Indian peers — Classplus, Learnyst, Graphy, Wise — have no built-in coding judge, and Western tools like Teachable have even less. For tech bootcamps, that's real money and manual work saved.
Who it's competing with
| Competitors | What it is | Global rank (11-05) | vs. Fermion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable / Thinkific / Kajabi | Western course platforms, from 2013–2014 years | 7K / 5.7K / 11k students | For individual creators selling courses, no coding environment |
| Graphy | Indian course platform | 130k people | Built for individual teachers, mostly non-technical content |
| Learnyst | Indian white-label LMS + app | 180k people | Strong in exam-prep coaching, apps and anti-piracy video |
| Classplus | Indian coaching white-label app | 340k people | App-first, aimed at small-town coaching centers |
| Testpress | Indian white-label LMS / exams / video, 2014 years | 345k people | No two-way live classes, so they bought Fermion |
| Wise | Indian live classes + LMS | 600k people | Direct overlap on live classes; ExcelR's other entry point lms.excelr.com still runs on it |
| VdoCipher | Indian anti-piracy video | 37k people | Only the video layer |
The last rival is no longer a rival: Fermion was acquired by Chennai-based Testpress in 2026 May 22. Testpress serves over a thousand institutes and wanted Fermion's two-way live classroom to fold into its video product. Fermion's announcement said "nothing changes for customers today," and Mehul moved on to consulting. The price was not disclosed. Coverage focused more on the founder later moving to Dubai than on the product itself.
The hard facts of this business
- The ranking rests on one customer: ExcelR also uses Wise. If it moves some learners away later, the fermion.app curve will drop with it. The old entry excelrv2.fermion.app now shows "plan discontinued", most likely because ExcelR switched to its own domain, unverified.
- ExcelR isn't new this year: the case page says the two began working together in May 2025, but traffic only jumped in August 2026. So a big customer takes over a year to move all its learners over, from signing to full cutover.
- Revenue has never been disclosed, and no one has posted numbers.
- The win was selling infrastructure they'd used themselves to peers, and the end was being bought by a peer. That's the typical outcome of a B2B slow-burn business, not an independent product still growing.
If it were you
Bottom line: there's a play to learn, but copying it is a poor bet. Fermion itself is already acquired, and the Indian market is crowded with similar players. What's replicable is "an all-in-one white-label back office for tech bootcamps"; doing it in another region is a slow sales grind, one institute at a time.
Who it suits: a team that already has online coding-course infrastructure built for itself (browser coding environment, judging, live classes) and real contacts in the coding-training scene of some region, e.g. the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or Latin America.
Who it doesn't suit: indie devs hoping to grow through traffic and self-serve signups. The customers here are institute owners: slow decisions, integrations, data migrations, and one big account can set your whole curve.
How to do it: don't build "another course platform." Target one pain point for tech coaching centers: "one back office replacing HackerRank + Zoom + the old LMS," and make the migration part of your service (the most praised bits in Fermion's case were data migration and automatic provisioning). Start by migrating one mid-sized coaching center for free, and turn it into a case study with numbers.
How to get customers: the founder does content and BD personally: post videos in the local coding community, pitch interviews to training institutes; write "X alternative" comparison pages to catch search traffic; use the first customer's case study to pitch the second and third.
How early should you be: no rush, this isn't a window-type opportunity. But after Testpress acquired Fermion, it may carry it into more regions, so confirm those regions aren't already covered before you pick yours.
Signs you've misread it: six months of talks without landing a single paying institute; or customers who only want live classes and video and don't care about coding judging. Then you're competing with Zoom and Classplus on price, with no reason to win.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Teachable / Thinkific / Kajabi Web 2013–2014 Tranco 7k / 5.7k / 11k Aimed at individual creators, no coding sandbox; Fermion uses their $199/mo starting price as the price anchor Graphy Web About 2020 Tranco 130k Aimed at individual teachers, mainly non-technical courses Learnyst Web About 2015 Tranco 180k Focused on exam coaching and app/DRM, no coding judge Classplus Android About 2018 Tranco 340k, large app footprint App-first, aimed at small-town coaching; Fermion is web-heavy and does technical courses Testpress Web 2014 Tranco 345k, 1000+ institutes No two-way live classes, and ended up acquiring Fermion Wise(wiseapp.live) Web About 2020 Tranco 604k Direct overlap on live classes + LMS; ExcelR's lms.excelr.com still runs on it HackerRank / LeetCode Web 2012 / 2015 Big Coding assessments only; ExcelR used it to supplement coding questions, and Fermion built that in VdoCipher Web About 2014 Tranco 37k Only the DRM video layer - Where users come from
- Verified Large-customer migration / sales close (ExcelR): fermion.app/customers/excelr states 653,000+ active learners on Fermion; CrUX best origin from 2026-08 is excelrv2.fermion.app; mylearning.excelr.com CNAMEs to cname.fermion.app
- Verified White-label architecture logs customer traffic to its own domain: customer subdomains *.fermion.app and static assets on *.storage.fermion.app (the mylearning.excelr.com page references them 125 times)
- Inferred Founder's personal reach / Indian coding-training network: Mehul Mohan is a codedamn YouTuber, active on X/LinkedIn; an interview on Learnbay; the customer wall is mostly Indian coding bootcamps
- Verified SEO alternative comparison pages: fermion.app/blog/teachable-vs-fermion, classplus-vs-fermion
- Verified Product Hunt: launched 2024-11-29, 282 votes (producthunt library)
Why Fermion (fermion.app) showed up
Research date 2026-11-07. Channel: web. Data card: Tranco was not in the top 1M 90 days ago, now 86,691; CrUX global entered the top 50k at 2026-08, India entered the top 5 thousand at 2026-09.
Bottom line
fermion.app's ranking climb was not earned by the product's own acquisition. It came from a large customer moving over wholesale: Indian bootcamp ExcelR moved its LMS with "over 653k active learners" from the old Edison system onto Fermion's white-label platform (learners access excelrv2.fermion.app, later mylearning.excelr.com with its own domain, but static assets all load from *.storage.fermion.app). The timing also coincided with the 8–September Indian university intake, when ExcelR's university programs started at the same time. Tranco and CrUX both aggregate by registrable domain, so learner traffic was all credited to fermion.app. Fermion itself was a B2B education infrastructure company; 2026-05 it was acquired by Chennai's Testpress, and the founder has left.
What it is
- A white-label "education cloud" for coaching institutes: live classes (two-way interaction, no seat cap), DRM on-demand video, coding sandbox / code judging, AI LMS, exam proctoring, WhatsApp marketing, all branded with the customer's own brand and domain (source: fermion.app homepage, docs.fermion.app).
- The team came from codedamn. Mehul Mohan built codedamn (browser-IDE interactive coding courses) in 2020 while in his third year at BITS Goa, raised an Antler India pre-seed (YourStory 2021-07) and money from Goodwater (Crunchbase); in mid-2024 he pivoted to Fermion: selling the infrastructure codedamn had built for itself to other training institutes (sources: Mehul's X post 2026-05-22, x.com/mehulmpt/status/2057734747863028164; LinkedIn launch post 2024-06, Ayush Garg).
- The Product Hunt launch got 2024-11-29,282 votes (our producthunt library).
- 2026-05-22 acquired by Testpress (Testpress founded 2014, based in Chennai, serving 1000+ institutes, with products including an LMS, exams, and TPStreams video). Testpress wanted Fermion's real-time two-way live classroom, which will be folded into Testpress / TPStreams; Fermion's existing customers are told "nothing changes" (sources: blog.testpress.in/welcoming-fermion-to-the-testpress-family/, fermion.app/acquisition). The founder moved into consulting and later relocated to Dubai (HT, NDTV, News18 2026-05-31 covered it, but as "burnout, moves to Dubai," not about the product).
- The website no longer has a pricing page (/pricing is 404), only "Schedule a Demo", which suggests a sales-led B2B model.
Where the traffic came from: the evidence chain
- Our traffic library rank_day: before 2026-09-03 it was not in the top 1M; 2026-09-10 was 515,871,09-17, 225,298,09-24 was 143,173,10-01, 109,742,10-07 was 86,303; afterward it stayed flat around 86–88k (11-05 was 86,691). The curve is a one-time step up followed by a plateau, not sustained growth. Tranco is a 30-day rolling average, lagging reality by 1–2 weeks, so working backward, real traffic jumped in mid-to-late 2026-08 in one step.
- Our traffic library crux_domain (best origin):
- 2026-05 to 07: India top 500k tier, best origin was
quickinsure.fermion.app(another customer) - 2026-08: India top 10k, global top 50k, best origin became
excelrv2.fermion.app - 2026-09: India top 5 thousand, Netherlands entered the top 500k (ExcelR has business there), best origin still
excelrv2.fermion.app
- 2026-05 to 07: India top 500k tier, best origin was
- ExcelR case page (https://fermion.app/customers/excelr): ExcelR previously ran the old LMS "Teach Edition/Edison" and served 600k+ learners. After moving to Fermion, "95% of data migrated, serving 653,000+ active learners on Fermion"; university programs can "run 50+ live sessions at once", "ran 38 batches in one day without Zoom"; coding assessments use the built-in sandbox, replacing LeetCode / HackerRank.
- DNS as of 2026-11-07 (tested live):
mylearning.excelr.comCNAMEs tocname.fermion.app, the response header isx-powered-by: fermion, and the page references68386ad3489ebf8656071397.storage.fermion.app125 times.excelrv2.fermion.appnow shows "This website is suspended. Plan Discontinued", which suggests the old subdomain was shut down after the move to a custom domain. Also,lms.excelr.compoints to the rival Wise (wiseapp.live), so ExcelR runs two systems at once and isn't all-in on Fermion. - Other customers:
lms.learnyard.comalso CNAMEs to fermion. The customer wall includes Kodnest, Learnbay, Vedam, Tap Academy, GenSpark (genspark.fermion.app), Quick Insure and 20 more, mostly Indian coding and IT training institutes.
Verdict: the ranking climb ≈ ExcelR's migration + India's academic-season enrollment spike. We couldn't find a public date for when the ExcelR migration started, but the CrUX 2026-08 best-origin change points clearly to it.
Competitors
| Competitors | Type | Scale (Tranco 2026-11-05, traffic library) | How it differs from Fermion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable / Thinkific / Kajabi | Western course platforms, from 2013–2014 years | 7,070 / 5,675 / 11,485 | Sells to individual creators, with no coding sandbox. Fermion benchmarks against Teachable/Thinkific at "$199/mo and up," claiming a free start and live classes with 10k concurrent users at no extra cost. |
| Graphy (Unacademy family) | India, creators running courses | 130,287 | Built for individual teachers, mostly non-technical content |
| Learnyst | Indian white-label LMS + app | 179,803 | Leans toward exam-prep education; strengths are the app and DRM |
| Classplus | Indian education white-label app, about 2018 years old | 340,211 | App-first, aimed at small-town education; Fermion is web-heavy and more technical |
| Testpress (now the acquirer) | Indian white-label LMS / exams / video, 2014 years | 345,394 | Lacked two-way live classes, so they acquired Fermion |
| Wise(wiseapp.live) | Indian live classes + LMS | 604,335 | ExcelR uses it too; its live-class features directly overlap with Fermion's |
| Teachmint / Edmingle / TagMango / Exly | Indian education SaaS | 223k / 254k / 196k / 522k | Focused on school management or creator monetization, with no coding judge |
| VdoCipher | Indian DRM video | 37,298 | Only the video layer |
| HackerRank / LeetCode | Coding assessment | Big | Assessment only; ExcelR originally used it to supplement coding questions |
| codedamn (the same team's earlier product) | Interactive coding learning | 614,740 (90 days ago, 400,124) | Consumer-facing for learners; has already ceded ground to Fermion |
Differentiation: for "technical training institutes," Fermion is a single white-label backend that bundles live classes + coding sandbox / judging + proctoring + LMS, all built on the infrastructure codedamn used for itself. Indian peers (Classplus, Learnyst, Graphy, Wise) have no built-in coding judge, and Western tools like Teachable have even less. ExcelR's case study centers on exactly this benefit, replacing LeetCode/HackerRank + Zoom with one platform, so the differentiation really is why it won the big client. But the direct cause of the ranking jump is the volume of that one large client, not the differentiation bringing in many new customers.
Growth channels
- Big-client migration / sales close (confirmed): the ExcelR case study page, the CrUX best origin, and the DNS evidence all line up.
- Founder's personal influence (partly confirmed): Mehul Mohan is an Indian coding YouTuber (the codedamn channel) and is active on X and LinkedIn. Fermion's launch and acquisition news were both posted by him personally. Early clients include several Indian coding training institutes (Kodnest and Learnbay both had him on their shows or invited him for interviews; YouTube: "How Fermion Is Redefining EdTech With AI | Mehul Mohan on Learnbay"), suggesting BD ran on his network in the community.
- SEO comparison pages (confirmed to exist): the official blog has comparison pages like "Teachable vs Fermion" and "Classplus vs Fermion."
- Product Hunt (confirmed, but small volume): 2024-11-29,282 votes.
- Paid ads: the ads field on the data card is empty, and our ad library shows no ads from it (not finding ads doesn't prove none were run).
- Testpress channel after the acquisition: Testpress has 1000+ institutional clients, and cross-selling may follow, but we have seen no evidence of it yet.
Visibility
- Revenue is not public (not listed on TrustMRR, and the founder hasn't shared figures).
- The media coverage has focused heavily on the founder moving to Dubai (HT, NDTV, News18, Indian Startup News, end of 2026-05), not on the product.
- Our local x-radar corpus returned no results for "fermion.app" over the past 180 days.
- Bottom line: the product itself is still little known, known only within a small circle of Indian education SaaS. It has also been acquired, so it is not an independent opportunity you can still "squeeze into."
Why it showed up (key points)
- One big client moved wholesale: ExcelR's 653k active learners moved to Fermion, and CrUX's best origin has been excelrv2.fermion.app since 2026-08.
- Academic season amplified the traffic: ExcelR runs many Indian university projects ("38 batches a day"), and India's academic year starts 8–September. CrUX's India tier went from top 500k to top 10k, then to top 5 thousand.
- The white-label architecture credits all clients' traffic to fermion.app: subdomains and custom-domain static assets both go through *.fermion.app, and Tranco merges by registrable domain, so learner visits from hundreds of clients add up.
- Product reason: a coding sandbox + live classes + LMS in one platform replaced third-party HackerRank / Zoom, which is the reason ExcelR gave for migrating (in its own case study).
Takeaways
- 把"自己做 C 端时练出来的基础设施"(浏览器 IDE、判题、直播)打包成白标 B2B,卖给同行,比自己做 C 端课程更容易赚钱,也更容易被收购。
- The play targets the technical training institute niche, pitching cost savings as "one platform replacing HackerRank + Zoom + the old LMS."
- Doing the same for coding / IT training institutions in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America has potential, but accept that it's a B2B business with slow sales, where one big client can make or break your traffic curve.
- A warning for our recovery work: a white-label SaaS domain's ranking climb often comes down to one or two big-client migrations. Check CrUX best_origin.
Uncertain
- We don't know the exact date of the ExcelR migration, the contract value, or whether it's exclusive. ExcelR still uses Wise (lms.excelr.com), so some business may move away later.
- The excelrv2 subdomain already shows "Plan Discontinued". This may just be a switch to a custom domain (mylearning.excelr.com still runs on Fermion), or some business may have been scaled down. Unverified.
- Unknown whether Fermion will remain a standalone brand after the Testpress acquisition (Testpress says it will fold the live-streaming capability into TPStreams).
- The acquisition price has not been disclosed.