Sequoia backs $55m round of 🇮🇳 upskilling startup

Scaler, an India-based upskilling startup in the edtech space, has secured US$55 million in a series B round led by Lightrock India. Existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global also participated in the round.

Scaler co-founders (from left) Abhimanyu Saxena and Anshuman Singh / Photo credit: Scaler

The latest investment raises the startup’s valuation to US$710 million.

It aims to cross the US$1 billion valuation mark in the next six months, Scaler co-founder Abhimanyu Saxena told Tech in Asia. India’s edtech space currently has six unicorns: Byju’s, Unacademy, upGrad, Eruditus, Vedantu, and Lead.

Launched in 2019, Scaler focuses on upskilling college students and tech professionals. Users on the platform are taught by over 1,000 tech leaders and subject matter experts, who work with organizations including Google, Facebook, Intuit, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Scaler says that users see an average return on investment of 4.5x from the courses. The company will use the fresh funds to expand into international markets, launch new products and business verticals, make strategic acquisitions, ramp up hiring, and increase its customer base globally and in India.

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“Currently, we are expanding our business into the United States as we see an immense opportunity in that market. We are building our team there and should be able to kickstart our first cohort by the end of this quarter,” said Saxena, who is also a co-founder of InterviewBit, the parent company of Scaler.

Scaler has over 8,500 active users on the platform, with over 2,000 learners enrolling every month.

The company said that the cumulative annual salary of its graduates is over US$80 million.

“If you factor in our expenses on teaching and infrastructure, Scaler enables the addition of more than US$100 million into India’s economy every year. Our next goal will be enabling the addition of US$100 billion to India’s gross domestic product annually,” Saxena said.