Little did the two ex-Infosys employees and IIT alumni knew that their small project of tutoring 60 engineering students would develop into a 30-crore company. Edureka, founded by Lovleen Bhatia and Kapil Tyagi is now fastest growing online education market place addressing the growing global skills gap in new age technology.
“The journey of Edureka started in 2011 when we started a small pilot project by tutoring 60 students of the ABES Engineering College in Ghaziabad,” said the founders.
After launching Eudreka with an investment of 1.5 crore, the startup grew bigger to Rs.30 crore company, generating 2,768 per cent revenue (FY 2013-14). Today, Edureka is a market leader in offering online courses for not only mid and senior level professionals, organisations but also freshers in the tech and business domains.
“Our tutorial model, unlike the free and pre-recorded videos of MOOCs, consists of real time instructor led live online classes on tech and business courses with 24×7 experts help support and free access to upgraded content for lifetime,” says Lovleen Bhatia.
Kapil Tyagi says, “Being interactive and available all time, this tutorial structure has addressed most issues of online education like lack of personalised feedback and assessment, one-on-one attention, content overload and most importantly not having the option to interact (live) with like-minded people.”
The popularity of the model helped the firm to register 30 per cent MoM growth in India and 20 per cent in overseas markets and reach break-even in the second year. Analysing global skills gap issue, offerings such as online education, live chat, interaction with tutors have been included by Edureka in niche tech domains like Hadoop, Big Data & Analysis, Cloud, Apache, Mongo DB, Spark, Scala, Python etc.
Its tutorial model, which garners 70 per cent course completion rate against MOOC’s, 4 per cent among industry professionals, is due to its high level of learner engagement and live interactive sessions.
Presently, Edureka has over 25,000 paying learners and has built an active community of 2.5 lakh learners from more than 50 countries within a span of four years. Over 65 per cent of its revenue comes from US and UK market with a majority from American and British tech NRIs who wants to skill up fast.
The demand of offerings by Edureka has been increasing from Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad, Jaipur, Chennai, Kolkata and Delhi based techies whereas global student base are coming from USA, UK, East Europe, S-E Asia, Far East and North African markets.
