upGrad Doubles Classes, Courses and Capacity to Deal with the Surge in Demand for Online Learning

Edtech major upGrad, India’s largest higher education provider just moved their start dates for all their 40 courses to start every month instead of quarterly, to take on the surge in demand from working professionals. This has more than doubled their course capacity, and each class now has a peak of 1000 learners at a given time.

“The larger the class in online, the more active the peer-to-peer learning and so it’s the inverse of offline learning,” says Ronnie Screwvala, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, upGrad.

"Last month we reached 5, 00,000 learners for our online programs, which is no mean feat in itself. Now take into consideration that our average ARPU is INR 2.5 lakhs. Yet, we are only at the very start of addressing a market of over 100 million working professionals and graduates." continues Screwvala.

This quarter, upGrad’s revenues will cross an annual run rate of INR 500 Cr with the launch of their Live Learning platform free of cost to multiple colleges and universities, to replicate their classrooms online and address their students during the Covid-19 period seamlessly. The company also separately recorded 10,000 enrollments for their 350 hours of free courses initiated during this period.

About upGrad:

Founded in early 2015, upGrad offers online programs for working professionals. In a short span of around 5 years, upGrad on-boarded over 53K paid learners and impacted more than 500K individuals globally, making it India’s largest online higher-education company, basis gross revenue generated from the Indian market in FY18-19.

upGrad provides programs in the areas of Data Science, Technology, Management and MBA to college students, working-class and enterprises. These programs are designed and delivered in collaboration with top-notch universities like IIT Madras, IIIT-B, BITS Pilani, MICA, NMIMS Global Access, Duke CE, Deakin University, Liverpool John Moores University and others. To further enhance the learning experience, a comprehensive ecosystem has been built which includes one-on-one mentoring, peer-to-peer learning, industry networking and most importantly expert career guidance providing learners' holistic support to elevate their careers to the next level.

The company has been awarded the title of ‘Best Tech for Education’ by IAMAI in 2019. The company received the ‘Best Education Brands’ award by Economic Times, Most Innovative Companies in India' by Fast Company in 2017 and has made it to LinkedIn’s ‘Top 25 Startups’ two years in a row in 2018 and 2019.