Just a few days ago the online executive-education platform Emeritus got $350 million in debt-financing from CPP Investments to fund its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) over the next five years.
Emeritusis part of the EruditusGroup, founded by Ashwin Damera and Chaitanya Kalipatnapu in 2010, and last valued at $3.2 billion in August 2021.
While the Mumbai-headquartered edtech unicorn now has a war chest for M&A, its journey to gross $505 million in bookings for fiscal year ended June 2022 has been almost entirely organic. Its first acquisition only happened in May last year — iD Tech — for $200 million.
Eruditus’ growth has played out over a decade in the backdrop of MOOC (massive open online courses) platforms like Coursera, Udacity, and EdX.
While Coursera went public on the New York Stock Exchange a year ago, EdX got acquired by 2U. Their courses are built in partnership with universities, whereas Udacity has evolved into a technical training platform that partners with companies like Google.
The MOOC highway helped Coursera scale up to nearly 97 million registered learners — and, revenue of $415.3 million — in 2021. In contrast, Eruditus’ annual bookings of $505 million has come on the back of 3 million registered learners.
Eruditus calls its operating model ‘SPOC’ (small open private courses) that is focused on completion of courses in its learner base.
But what makes the company unique in the league of edtech unicorns from India like BYJU’S, Unacademy, and Vedantu is that much of Eruditus’ revenue growth has been driven by learners outside India.
Simply put, it is a global company unlike its Indian peers.
In fiscal year ended June 2021, Eruditus clocked annual bookings of $175 million. Of this, 36 percent came from the United States of America (US), 16 percent from Latin America, and 15 percent from Europe.
Effectively, two-thirds of Eruditus’ FY 2021 bookings were from the three regions, compared to 59 percent in FY 2020, and 52 percent in FY 2021.
This is the story of why and how Eruditus discovered its global learner base.
The early years
It took Eruditus five years to hone its product-proposition and learner experience in executive education. Between 2010 and 2015, it evolved as a service to enable classroom-learning of courses curated with leading universities across the world. Think INSEAD, Wharton, or Kellogg.
Founders Ashwin and Chaitanya were clear about who their customers were — working professionals. And there were three reasons for this.
One, working professionals had the disposable income to afford executive education. Two, it was more affordable for learners to study on Eruditus in India, than if they had to leave work to do a two-year course in any of the global universities. And three, the Eruditus experience helped students get certification from global universities on completion.
So, Ashwin and Chaitanya figured out how to work with the global universities to design on-premise executive-education programmes. It was a back-breaking process, but the duo was convinced that the courses would be valued by learners in India.
However, they faced a reality check in India in 2015: the number of students paying for the executive-education courses was still in three digits.
This meant if Eruditus had to maximise revenue for the courses it co-created with Ivy League universities, it had to think global. Think online — that was the only way.
Emeritus.org became the global face of its SPOC programmes. And the founders put their might behind making it an online learning platform for working professionals. They haven’t looked back since.
