About Eruditus
Eruditus Executive Education and its online division Emeritus collaborate with leading universities in the United States, Europe, Latin America, India, and China to provide world-class business and professional education to a global audience.
Eruditus has worked with more than 50 universities, including MIT, Columbia, Harvard, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, INCAE, IIT, IIM, NUS, and HKUST, and has educated over 250,000 people in more than 80 countries. Many courses, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Mandarin, are provided and facilitated in various languages.
The Eruditus Group includes offices in Mumbai, New Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore, Palo Alto, Mexico City, New York, Boston, London, and Dubai, with over 1,400 workers worldwide. In the $280 billion worldwide professional education market, Eruditus is a global leader.
The early years
Eruditus spent five years refining its executive education product offering and learner experience. It evolved as a service to enable classroom learning of courses created with premier universities worldwide between 2010 and 2015. Consider the schools of INSEAD, Wharton, and Kellogg.
Ashwin and Chaitanya, the founders, were quite clear about who their target market was: working professionals. Three factors contributed to this. For one thing, working professionals have the financial means to pay for executive education. Two, learning Eruditus in India was more economical than doing a two-year course at any of the world’s institutions. Finally, the Eruditus experience aided students in obtaining certification from international colleges once they completed the program.
As a result, Ashwin and Chaitanya devised a strategy for collaborating with global universities to develop on-site executive education programs. It was a grueling procedure, but the team was confident that the classes would be well received by Indian students.
However, in India in 2015, they were confronted with reality: the number of students paying for executive-education courses was still in the three digits. This meant Eruditus had to think big if it wanted to maximize revenue from the courses it co-created with Ivy League universities. Consider the internet – it was the only option.
Emeritus.org was chosen as the global face of the organization’s SPOC programs. The founders worked tirelessly to make it an online learning platform for working people. Since then, they haven’t looked back.
The story behind why and how Eruditus found its global learner base
The re-skilling start-up raised $650 million from Softbank and Accel at a valuation of $3.2 billion.
CPP Investments has provided $350 million in debt financing to Emeritus, an online executive education platform, to fund its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) over the next five years.
Emeritus is a subsidiary of the Eruditus Group, which was created in 2010 by Ashwin Damera and Chaitanya Kalipatnapu and is currently valued at $3.2 billion. While the Mumbai-based ed-tech unicorn now has a war chest for M&A, the company’s growth to $505 million in bookings for the fiscal year ending June 2022 was nearly completely organic. Its first acquisition, iD Tech, was made in May of last year for $200 million.
Eruditus’ expansion has been fueled by MOOC (massive open online courses) platforms such as Coursera, Udacity, and EdX during the last decade. EdX was acquired by 2U a year after Coursera went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Their courses are developed in collaboration with colleges, whereas Udacity has grown into a technical training platform that collaborates with firms such as Google.
In 2021, the MOOC motorway helped Coursera grow to approximately 97 million registered learners and $415.3 million in revenue. Eruditus, on the other hand, has $505 million in yearly bookings based on 3 million enrolled learners.
Eruditus’ operational style is known as ‘SPOC’ (miniature open private courses), and it focuses on course completion among its learner base. But what sets Eruditus apart from India’s Edtech unicorns like BYJU’S, Unacademy, and Vedantu is that a large portion of the company’s revenue growth has come from learners outside of India.
Simply told, it is a multinational corporation, unlike its Indian counterparts.
Eruditus had yearly bookings of $175 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2021. The United States of America (US) contributed 36%, Latin America contributed 16%, and Europe contributed 15%.In FY 2021, the three regions accounted for two-thirds of Eruditus’ bookings, compared to 59 percent in FY 2020 and 52 percent in FY 2021.
