Upskilling Startup Scaler Academy Raises $55 Mn, Valuation Touches $710 Mn

Edtech startup InterviewBit’s upskilling platform Scaler Academy has raised $55 Mn in a Series B funding round at a $710 Mn valuation led by Lightrock India, a new investor, and existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global. 

Founded by Anshuman Singh and Abhimanyu Saxena in 2014, InterviewBit offers online computer science programs for college graduates and young professional software engineers. In 2019, it renamed its InterviewBit Academy course to Scaler Academy.

Launched in 2019, Scaler aims to offer high-quality technical education. According to the startup, Scaler Academý students are taught by tech leaders and subject matter experts from various tech giants, including Google, Facebook, Intuit, Microsoft, Amazon, Hotstar, and Snapdeal.

John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, said, “As an experienced investor in India’s startup ecosystem, we are particularly bullish about the country’s edtech companies. Scaler’s relatively young age (since April 2019) is more than made up for by the vision and maturity of its founders and the 800-plus-member team that is on a mission to disrupt India’s tech education space. We could not be more excited to double down on our investment in Scaler and continue to support the team.”

It plans to deploy the freshly-infused capital towards pursuing international expansion, launching new product offerings, making strategic acquisitions and onboarding more talent while also growing its customer base in India. 

According to the startup, it has raised a total of $76.5 Mn in venture capital funding including the funds raised in this round.

“We have over 380+ alumni in just these 9 companies alone – Microsoft, Google, Uber, Amazon, Paypal, Adobe, VMWare, Intuit, Mcafee. The cumulative annual salary of Scaler graduates is more than Rs 600 crore as of today,” claimed Abhimanyu Saxena, cofounder at Scaler.

“If you factor in our expenses on teaching and infra, Scaler enables the addition of more than $100 Mn into India’s economy every year. Our next goal will be enabling the addition of a billion USD to India’s GDP annually,” added Saxena.

According to Inc42 analysis, Indian edtech startups raised a total of $4.7 Bn in funding across 165 deals in 2021. The average ticket sizes of investments were $1.7 Mn, $9.3 Mn and $106 Mn respectively for seed, growth and late-stage funding round respectively. Delhi-NCR emerged as the top hub for edtech startups.

In the meanwhile, the global market for corporate training was valued at $332.93 Bn in 2019 and is expected to grow to $417.21 Bn in 2027 at a CAGR of 9.4% between 2021 and then. 

“The team at Scaler Academy are transforming higher education in India by democratising the privilege of working in technology for millions of Indians. They are building a learning community that is accountable for outcomes and designed for the future of work,” said Divya Venkatavaraghavan, principal investor at Lightrock India.

Last week, Business skills coaching startup Peakperformer had raised $3 Mn in a seed funding round led by Sequoia India’s Surge, with participation from Antler India, Blume Founders Fund, and some angel investors. Similarly, Growth School, which offers community-led live learning platform raised $5 Mn from Sequoia and others. Learners learn fromwith mentors, professionals and influencers that have already become leaders in their particular domain. 

Pesto, Udemy, SP robotics, Udacity, SOAL and upGrad are a few other startups that are upskilling engineers and entry-level workers.