India edtech player Scaler raises $55m
Lightrock India has led a USD 55m Series B round for Scaler Academy, an Indian education technology start-up that operates an upskilling platform focused on IT professionals.
Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global Management, which provided a USD 20m Series A in 2020 alongside the Singapore Economic Development Board, also participated. The investment values the company at USD 710m.
Scaler’s platform helps college students and tech professionals access services such as live gamified classrooms, one-on-one mentoring, and networking with other IT sector participants. It has specialisations in software engineering, data science, and machine learning.
The idea is that universities unable to meet the growing demand for new skills in India’s estimated USD 200bn IT sector. Scaler said that “higher education must shift from learning to skilling, from poor accountability to employability and from physical communities to digital tribes.”
Lightrock, an impact investor, described the business model as transforming higher education for millions of Indians by democratising the privilege of working in technology. The three-year-old platform is said to enable the injection of more than USD 100m into India's annual GDP. The target is USD 1bn, although a timeframe has not been set.
Scaler claims that its graduates are employed by 70% of domestic unicorns, as well as by global giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Uber, PayPal, and Adobe. It will use the Series B capital for international expansion, new product launches, acquisitions, and a staff build-out.
“The failure of legacy institutions in India's higher education sector, particularly in the IT space, has opened up opportunities for avowed status quo disruptors like Scaler to push a new kind of thinking that looks beyond cost arbitrage-based success,” Abhimanyu Saxena, a co-founder of Scaler (pictured left), said in a statement.
“Technologies like machine learning and data science will create a new kind of India powered by communication technologies like 5G that will have a far-reaching impact on the country's socioeconomic status.”
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