Indian edtech startup hopes to shake up lifelong learning in Southeast Asia

It’s been over five years since Ankit Bansal, 29, graduated from engineering college and began working full time. But the techie from Agra, the north Indian city best known for the Taj Mahal, couldn’t quite shrug the feeling that he was missing some of the basic skills of the trade.

Bansal signed up with two US-based edtech platforms that offer higher education courses to tackle this. Neither got the job done.

“Even when the course material was good, the waiting period to resolve doubts (questions) was too much, almost five to six days in some cases,” says Bansal.

Photo credit: Vanessa Garcia / Pexels

Mumbai-based upGrad was his third try at using such platforms, and it worked like a charm. The engineer, who picked up machine learning and artificial intelligence know-how via the edtech service, credits the courses he took for making him better placed in the industry today.

“I got a 150% hike [in salary] last year. This year, the company is giving me a 100% hike again and has also promoted me to a team leader.” This, he says, is because he’s been able to apply what he’s learned.

Founded in 2015, upGrad has about 1 million learners in 50+ countries, and it offers well over 100 online courses for working professionals. The company recorded 100% revenue growth last year.

Now, upGrad is making a concerted effort to expand in the Asia-Pacific region. Its Indonesia office opened early this year, and the company is looking at countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines next.

After partnering with universities such as Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, Deakin Business School in Australia, Michigan State University in the US, and Indian Institute of Technology Madras in India, upGrad is looking to work with prominent Indonesian higher learning institutions as well.

Diving in with solutions

For a long time, online education has been treated like video streaming: Players in the space just kept putting out a lot of content, says Mayank Kumar, co-founder and managing director at upGrad.

“People thought education was like Netflix. But you can’t binge watch Python or digital marketing,” he says.

Bringing in a human touch – with coaches, mentors, graders, and peers – is how the company aims to fix what Kumar describes as the “broken online education system.”

Often, the co-founder underlines the significance of what upGrad wants to do by asking his newer colleagues to count the number of jobs they’ve had and the total number of years they’ve worked. He then compares that to the number of jobs their parents have had and the years they worked.

The difference is often stark.

Apples can’t be compared with oranges