India’s largest online higher education company upGrad, launched a 4-pronged initiative in April’20 to grow their learners’ headcount and revenue base 4-fold this year. In this COVID-19 period, the edtech major has on-boarded over 100 colleges and universities onto their platform paving the way for further evangelizing blended online learning as the future of education.
The 4 strategic initiatives are:
(1) Launching 35 new diverse online programs in the next few months
(2) All their 90 online programs to have a start date of every month, vs every quarter as done previously, to cope with the growing demand
(3) Being the first in India to enable degree with universities through blended online degree programs
(4) Strengthening the global footprint by targeting the 40 million South Asian migrant population worldwide
upGrad reported Gross Student Revenue of ₹50 Crore/month for the month of June’20 that will grow to ₹100 Crore/month by September’20 and will close at ₹200 Crore/month by March’21, thereby crossing a ₹1200 crore annual run rate by end of this fiscal year. The company also informed that while it reported a nominal loss in Q1 of this year due to its high investments for their upcoming launches, they would be profitable from the 2nd quarter of this financial year.
“We operate on a Gross Margin of close to 90% after GST and university share. That allows us to invest back into making our Tech, Content & Learning Experience very robust as we scale both in India and around the world. ‘Higher Education’ is finally being understood by most as the fastest-growing segment in the edtech sector and we have defied all the sceptics who felt that the addressable market is not so large and there cannot be scale in higher education,” stated Ronnie Screwvala, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman, upGrad.
