The funding
streak for educational startups in Asia continues into 2019 after Emeritus, a
U.S-Indian company that partners with universities to offer digital courses,
landed a $40 million Series C round led by Sequoia India.
The deal
includes participation from existing investor Bertelsmann India Investments,
and it takes Emeritus — founded in 2010 as offline management program company
Eruditus — to around $50 million from investors to date. It also follows
notable rounds in December for India-based education companies Byju’s ($540
million) and Toppr ($35 million).
Emeritus is
the online branch of Eruditus. It was founded in 2014 as a response to the
growth in digital learning. Specifically, it took the core elements of the
Eruditus — which include helping educational institutions design new
curriculums — and applied it to the online space to develop certificate courses
and online degrees.
The company
has offices in Boston — where it works to develop curriculum content — as well
as Dubai, Mexico, Mumbai and Singapore. In total, it has some 350 employees
while its partners include MIT, Columbia, Tuck at Dartmouth, Wharton, UC
Berkeley and London Business School.
Today,
Emeritus accounts for most of the business’s growth potential and it is really
the focus of this investment, co-founder and director Ashwin Damera told TC in
an interview.
“We’re
helping working professionals who can’t otherwise come to these schools to
access high-quality educational content online,” Damera said. “It’s very
different from a MOOC [such as Coursera or Udemy], we are a SPOC — small,
private, online course.”
For one
thing, all Emeritus courses are run in collaboration with universities, they
tend to attract older students — since they are masters level — and their completion
rates are around 90 percent, according to Damera. Students on a course, he
said, are broken down into sections of around 100 and then smaller working
groups of around six, much like traditional offline courses.
Emeritus
said it will enroll 30,000 students from 80 countries during this current
financial year. That’s a figure that Damera wants to grow ten-fold over the
next five years.
The
company’s strategy to reach that lofty goal revolves around widening its reach
to new audiences. A key part of that focus is to expand its existing English
and Spanish content libraries, and develop content in Portuguese and Mandarin
for the first time. Interestingly, in the case of China, Emeritus is open to a
potential acquisition or a joint venture to get a local business up and
running.
Right now,
Damera said that just 70 percent of students are based overseas. In addition to
accommodating additional international languages, he said that global push will
mean the company will develop its tech stack to enable a greater more mobile-based
content for students.
But, beyond
those perhaps obvious areas, Emeritus is examining the potential to offer newer
products and courses at more affordable prices. In particular, Damera believes
there is a “huge opportunity” to apply itself to bachelor degree education
although he plans to expand its master degrees first.
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