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Executive education refers to academic programs at graduate-level business schools for executives, business leaders and functional managers globally. These programs are generally non-credit and non-degree-granting, but sometimes lead to certificates and some offer continuing education units accepted by professional bodies and institutes.
Eruditus delivers high-quality executive education programs to corporations and participants across the globe.
Eruditus - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Eruditus Executive Education |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Mumbai, Maharashtra, India |
| Industry | Education and Training |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Valuation | $3.2 billion (August 2021) |
| Total Funding Amount | $813.5M (As of August 2021) |
| Founders | Chaitanya Kalipatnapu and Ashwin Damera |
| Area Served | Worldwide |
| Website | www.eruditus.com |
Eruditus - About and How it Works?
Eruditus - Emeritus
Eruditus - Logo and its Meaning
Eruditus - Founder and History
Eruditus - Mission
Eruditus - Recent News
Eruditus - Team
Eruditus - Business Model
Eruditus - Revenue and Growth
Eruditus - Funding and Investors
Eruditus - Competitors
Eruditus - Challenges Faced
Eruditus - Future Plans
Eruditus - FAQs
Eruditus - About and How it Works?
Eruditus provides executive education programs intended for mid-career professionals. The company's portfolio of customized and open programs are designed and conducted in alliance with global leading business schools in a range of formats, including short workshops spanning a few weeks, online programs or complete modular sessions, enabling professionals to get access to relevant programs that help them get new knowledge and grow in their careers.
Eruditus executive business courses deliver high-quality executive education programs to corporations and participants across the globe. The Company's programs are created using a broad spectrum of learning methods and modules, all put together to adapt around one's busy schedules and work commitments.
Eruditus' programs are designed in the way that one can learn through actual classroom interactions, online sessions, case studies, real-time simulations and practical exercises that push everyone right in the face of dealing with challenges.
The Eruditus group, consisting of Eruditus Executive Education and its online division Emeritus, partners with top-tier universities across the United States, Europe, Latin America, India and China to bring world-class business and professional education to a global audience.
Eruditus has partnered with more than 30 universities to date, including MIT, Columbia, Harvard, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, INCAE, IIT, IIM, NUS and HKUST, launching more than 100 courses and serving students from more than 80 countries. Many courses are offered and facilitated in multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin.
Eruditus' programs would encourage one to ask relevant questions, provoke strategic thinking and debate with peers – skills that one can put to use even in the everyday office environment.
Eruditus - Emeritus
Emeritus(a U.S-Indian company) is the online branch of Eruditus. It was founded in 2014 as a response to the growth in digital learning. Specifically, it took the core elements of Eruditus — which include helping educational institutions design new curriculums — and applied them to the online space to develop certificate courses and online degrees.
The company has offices in Boston — where it works to develop curriculum content — as well as Dubai, Mexico, Mumbai and Singapore. In total, it has some 350 employees, while its partners include MIT, Columbia, Tuck at Dartmouth, Wharton, UC Berkeley and London Business School.
"Today, Emeritus accounts for most of the business’s growth potential and is really the focus of this investment," co-founder and director Ashwin Damera said. “We’re helping working professionals who can’t otherwise come to these schools to access high-quality educational content online and It’s very different from a MOOC [such as Coursera or Udemy], we are a SPOC — small, private, online course.”
Eruditus - Logo and its Meaning
The Eruditus logo has their name highlighted which means a scholar who is erudite (Latin: eruditus) when instruction and reading followed by digestion and contemplation have effaced all rudeness, that is to say smoothed away all raw, untrained incivility.
Eruditus - Founder and History
Eruditus was founded in 2010 by Chaitanya Kalipatnapu and Ashwin Damera.
At a time when the online education space is booming and valuations doubling and tripling in the blink of an eye, it's tempting to assume that this is all there is to it. But for a large part of Damera and Eruditus’ journey, it wasn’t even about the “growth at all costs,” which they and all startups preach today. It was slow, steady, under the radar -- and it is what defines Eruditus even today.
In 2010, Damera was wondering what to do next. A year earlier, he had sold his first startup - a hotel listing platform called Travelguru, to Travelocity, which was later acquired by Yatra - one of India’s preeminent online travel aggregators today.
“See, universities have built an amazing business model around rejecting people. This education changed our lives, but how can we change others’ lives?” Damera says.
Eruditus Executive Education started in 2010, with faculty from INSEAD and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) teaching a 10 day-classroom program in a 5-star hotel for 10-15 people. No internet, no tech, no venture capital. From the beginning, Eruditus has focused on executive education - short to long courses for experienced professionals - say with 5 to 10 years of experience - in fields such as management, leadership, banking and finance.
From 2010 to 2015 this is all they did. They launched partnerships with Harvard, Wharton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and others, persuading each of them, one by one. They also launched classes in Southeast Asia and Dubai.
Eruditus - Mission
Eruditus' mission statement says, "Our mission of providing access to affordable, high-quality education could not have happened without going global."
PV Vyshnavi
Eruditus - Recent News
Eruditus raises $650 million in the latest round dated August 12, 2021, led by Accel Partners and Softbank Vision Fund II and with it, the company enters the coveted unicorn club, becoming the 23rd unicorn startup of India in 2021.
Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan's philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, has invested in education technology startup, Eruditus.
Eruditus - Team
- Chaitanya Kalipatnapu - Co-founder and Director
- Ashwin Damera - Co-founder and Director
- Emmanuelle Perraud - Associate Director
Eruditus - Business Model
Eruditus partner with global Ivy League business schools to offer blended classroom and online learning programs for working professionals across the world. The programs are aimed at helping a participant evolve from functional to management leadership roles.
Eruditus - Revenue and Growth
Eruditus, the online education startup, recorded a revenue of $100 million in FY20 and was looking to raise the revenue by the end of FY21. The brand successfully ramped up its revenue, concluding FY21 with $185 million in revenue.
Eruditus is now looking to more than double its revenue by the end of FY22.
Rishabh Rathi
Eruditus - Funding and Investors
Eruditus Executive Education has raised a total of $813.5M in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Aug 12, 2021 from a Series E round.
Eruditus Executive Education is funded by 8 investors in total. Accel Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund II are the most recent investors.
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 12, 2021 | Series E | $650 million | Accel Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund II |
| Aug 31, 2020 | Series D | $113M | Leeds Illuminate, Prosus Ventures |
| Nov 30, 2018 | Series C | $40M | Sequoia Capital India |
| Jul 6, 2018 | Debt Financing | $2.3M | InnoVen Capital |
| Apr 3, 2017 | Series B | ₹530M | Bertelsmann India Investments |
| May 1, 2016 | Series A | - | - |
Eruditus - Competitors
Top Eruditus competitors include Academic & Professional Studies Abroad (APSA), Toppr, BYJU'S, Vedantu, Unacademy, INSEAD, UNIVentures, Babson, ESSEC, HEC Paris, Reyna Overseas, Xyleme and UniServity.
Eruditus - Challenges Faced
It took Damera six years, till 2016, to get Eruditus to an annual revenue of $10 million. Growing slowly, steadily, without fuss or hype. The plan to go online changed everything, and made it the tech company you see today. But the decision was not easy.
Today, at a time when many startups raise millions before they even have a product, sometimes purely on an idea or the founder’s reputation, raising money six years in stands out.
While it took six years to get $10 million in revenue, in four more years, it has zoomed to $100 million revenues in FY20 - a figure Damera wants to double next year, while staying profitable. Eruditus is currently profitable on an Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA) basis, a metric of operating profits. Damera says 100,000 students will learn on Eruditus this year, compared to 50,000 last fiscal.
“Had we raised money in 2010-11 it would have been problematic. Raising money much later gave us time to build our product, understand the market, and honestly, stay under the radar,” he adds.
It’s quite glamorous to talk about success, but it was the failure of their first program that played an important role in shaping the Eruditus business model. They launched a 3-month executive program in the Indian market with the idea that they can assemble the best faculty and practitioners, with an equal dose of lectures, applications, and projects to create a blockbuster program.
While it had all the ingredients of success, after a three-month-long marketing cycle, they were only able to enroll 21 participants. The company ran the program, of course, at a huge loss but it gave them invaluable experience on how to position and execute a world-class program.
They realized that it was not enough just to have the best of faculty, but also needed a brand on which to carry the program. This helped them define their “product-market-fit”, made them navigate towards collaborating with top universities and defined their business model going forward.
Despite the challenges - of a random Indian startup tying up with the world’s top B-Schools, of crunched timings and seasonal classes - it was working. Students were showing up every time, professors were showing up every time and the feedback was good.
Chayanika Goswami
Eruditus - Future Plans
Over the next 10 years, the company's goal is to expand reach to high-quality education to every segment and every geography. This needs some innovative solutions; for example, they have seen that in emerging countries including India, most students find it challenging to fund their programs.
The company is solving that by partnering with loan providers and helping them automate their processes so that students can access loans easily. Another innovation is in the program content itself where they are bringing students into the world of digital transformation, business analytics, design thinking, fintech, etc.
They have also brought in global industry practitioners as part of the programs, which really offers a different perspective and helps our students open up to other possibilities.
Among its short-term goals, Eruditus is planning to more than doubly raise its revenue in FY22.
Eruditus' vision for 2030 is to scale up across every geography and truly democratize the access to quality education.
Eruditus - FAQs
What does Eruditus do?
Eruditus provides executive education programs intended for mid-career professionals.
Who founded Eruditus?
Eruditus was founded in 2010 by Chaitanya Kalipatnapu and Ashwin Damera.
What is Eruditus' business model?
Eruditus partner with global Ivy League business schools to offer blended classroom and online learning programs for working professionals across the world. The programs are aimed at helping a participant evolve from functional to management leadership roles.
Author: Sarika Anand
Source : https://startuptalky.com/eruditus-success-story/
Date : 2021-08-12T16:10:00.000Z