The Upskiller of Education Industry KRISHNA KUMAR, CEO & FOUNDER OF SIMPLILEARN

Fundamentally, if you look at the edtech industry, you'll notice that it's spread very broadly. Simplilearn finds itself in the professional part of the edtech sector as opposed to K-12 and university areas. Sharing more on making a dent in the education sector, KRISHNA KUMAR, CEO & FOUNDER OF SIMPLILEARN says, "We essentially aim to upskill professionals who are either working or looking for work. Unfortunately for professionals, the digital talent that they are proficient in, changes regularly. For example, Cloud computing has grown rapidly in the past 15 years, so has data science in the last 10 years. Hence, you have to be on your toes and stay updated to avoid redundancy." Edtech has largely been a video learning-based platform in the professional skilling space where you have Moocs and many other providers that offer video-based learning. If you're a professional, you realize you're being disrupted by additional skills and you're not going to be able to do this on your own. This is exactly the problem Simplilearn is trying to solve i.e. take these digital skills and turn them into role-based programs that allow professionals to receive expert mentoring through a well-structured, case-study and project-based curriculum. While video streaming platforms work for the top 10% of customers or learners who can figure out their own learning route quickly, Simplilearn caters to the rest of the population who want a lot more hand-holding and white-glove attention.

On the academic front, Simplilearn has collaborated with universities like MIT, Caltech, Purdue University, Massachusetts and IIT Kanpur. And on the industry side, they work with Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and a slew of other significant names. Their faculty is typically a mix of both academia and industry. As a result, when a learner comes to the platform, the first thing they notice is value, both in terms of academia and industry. "Today at Simplilearn, we have a Net Promoter Score of 80 and 85 percent of the learners who have graduated from our programs have actually achieved the goal that they had desired," adds Kumar.

Simplilearn started as a global company. "We have been global from day one - the only difference is that then we were a blog platform while now we are a learning platform. In fact, we have recorded over 60% of revenue from overseas markets post-pandemic. In addition to our primary markets of India and the USA, we have witnessed strong demand from South Africa, UK, Saudi Arabia and Australia," claims Kumar. They have over 70,000 learners learning live at any given time from across more than 150 countries.

As the edtech market continues to grow, consolidation is bound to happen. Many edtech companies are increasingly buying niche startups to diversify their portfolios. Sharing his views Kumar says, "I believe there are three types of EdTech niches that will actually come out in the professional space. First is the shorter program niche, which generally follows a video-based approach, the second would be role-oriented, which again mostly follows a low-engagement video-based approach. And then there is a role-oriented, high-engagement and outcome-oriented kind of niche, which is the Bootcamp space, this is where we operate."

Factsheet

• Year of inception - 2010
• No. of paid users - Over 10000 new learners per month only on the company website (App not covered here.)
• Subscription base (website) – Over 3 Lakh in the past year
• SkillUp platform (Free learning platform) - over 5 lakh enrolments so far since November 2020
• Most popular course-Digital skills includes courses like DevOps, Cloud Architect, AI & Machine Learning, Data Science and Digital Marketing.
• Funding received so far- $28M from Kalaari Capital, Helion Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund.