Eruditus raises $40 million in Series C funding from Sequoia India

To invest in enhancing online education platform, expand multilingual capabilities

Educational technology (edtech) and executive education program provider Eruditus Group has completed a Series C funding worth $ 40 million (Rs 282 crore roughly) led by Sequoia India along with participation from existing investor Bertelsmann India Investments.

The edtech group comprises Eruditus Executive Education and its online division Emeritus, leading global professional education providers. Eruditus has been providing executive education programs across countries in collaboration with university partners like MIT, Columbia, Harvard Business School, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley and London Business School, among others. 

The latest round of funding, advised exclusively by Avendus Capital, has come on the back of a 10x growth in students over the last two years even as Eruditus will be enrolling 30,000 students across over 80 countries in the current fiscal year. The previous funding happened in March 2017, when Eruditus, the executive education programmes provider, had announced raising $8 million (Rs 56 crore approximately) in its Series B round from Bertelsmann India Investments (BII), after raising an undisclosed sum in its Series A.

According to Ashwin Damera, co-founder and Director at Emeritus, the latest funding round will allow the group to increase its course offerings in high-demand subject areas such as data science, machine learning, blockchain and cybersecurity and to expand its language offerings to include Portuguese and Mandarin, in addition to English and Spanish.   

"Seventy percent of our students are based outside of the United States, and this fundraise will help accelerate our mission of making high-quality professional education more accessible and affordable. We will use the proceeds of this latest fundraise to create a more immersive and adaptive learning platform, to expand our multilingual capabilities, and to ensure that our omni-channel offerings are readily available to our students on-the-go," said Damera.

Commenting on the funding, GV Ravishankar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors said that the investor company continues to be active in the education space with the latest round. 

"Upskilling and reskilling represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the global education market. Driven both by individual learners investing in their own professional development and by corporations investing in the development of their employees, the massive challenge of reskilling in response to technology evolution is throwing open a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for education entrepreneurs," said Ravishankar.