Sequoia leads $40m round for Indian edtech company

Eruditus, founded in 2010, partners with leading universities including MIT, Columbia, INSEAD, and London Business School to provide blended education programs focused on working professionals. Its offerings typically feature a mix of on-campus, off-campus, and online delivery, with 30,000 students from more than 80 countries expected to enroll in its courses.

The company will use the new capital to upgrade its online platform Emeritus, which caters to professionals who wish to expand their skills but cannot access full-time courses. Emeritus plans to expand its course offerings to include classes in machine learning, data science, blockchain, and cybersecurity, and to add support for Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese, in addition to English and Spanish.

Previous investments in Eruditus include an $8 million Series B round from Bertelsmann in 2017 and $2.3 million in venture debt funding from InnoVen Capital last year. The company expects to increase its enrolment more than 10 times over the next five years.

“Upskilling and reskilling represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the global education market,” said GV Ravishankar, managing director at Sequoia, in a statement. “Driven both by individual learners investing in their own professional development and by corporations investing in the development of their employees, the massive challenge of reskilling in response to technology evolution is throwing open a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for education entrepreneurs.”

Sequoia is an active investor in India’s education technology space, with commitments to such prominent start-ups as Byju’s and Unacademy. The firm is currently investing its sixth India fund, which closed last year at $695 million and targets early and growth-stage companies in the technology, consumer, and healthcare sectors across India and Southeast Asia.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Consumer
• Expansion
• India
• TMT
• Sequoia Capital
• Education