Scalar Academy’s US Foray Now Clocking $1 Mn Monthly In 3 Months

Being valued at around $10 Bn by 2025, undoubtedly, India’s edtech sector has been on a roll for the past few years. As homegrown edtech startups are raising investments from VC firms, they are also ambitious about their international expansion plans, especially in the US market. The case in point is Scaler Academy. The edtech startup raising $55 Mn at a $710 Mn valuation in February this year, speaks volumes.

Scaler expanded to the US market about three months ago. Within this short span, it reached $1 Mn monthly revenue in the market, on the back of its strong distribution and its other entity InterviewBit, claims Anshuman Singh, cofounder, Scaler and InterviewBit.

While speaking at The Makers Summit, Singh said, in the education business, building trust or a strong brand image is an important factor. Scaler Academy puts a high effort into trust-building through different avenues such as success stories and free masterclasses.

“To be able to price higher, you need to crack the trust game,” Singh said.

It is to be noted that Scaler Academy programmes are largely priced at INR 2.5 Lakh in India and $10,000 in the US market.

According to Singh, if an edtech startup is able to build trust among its users, it helps in gaining customer acquisitions at a lower cost. Currently, peer-to-peer referrals account for 30% of Scaler Academy’s enrolment, Singh said. And as per him, Scaler wants to focus on increasing the referrals share going forward.

Besides, according to Singh, distribution becomes a key aspect for scaling any edtech business.

“If you are spending on creating distribution for your startup, you will bring down customer acquisition cost (CAC) significantly,” he said. For initial one to 1.5 years, Scaler Academy maintained zero customer acquisition cost as it was able to acquire all of its users from InterviewBit, Singh claimed.

Watch TMS 2022 Sessions

Launched in 2019, Scaler is a part of InterviewBit that was founded by Anshuman Singh and Abhimanyu Saxena in 2014. As it aims to scale high-quality technical education, it currently works in upskilling programmes in two sectors – software engineering and data science.

“Even before the pandemic started, Jio’s launch in India led to the democratisation of internet access to even masses. Simultaneously, there was also the creation of all of these sectors that led to large rising demand for engineers and in fact talents in every sector. Given the fact that 98% of engineering graduates are unemployable, finding a good resource became a pain point due to the dearth of talent,” Singh said.

Scaler Academy tried to tap into that opportunity to bridge the talent gap. The startup which has now been operational for close to three years, claims to have close to 4,000 graduates on the platform.

Scaler is growing at a 10-15% month-on-month rate, Singh said.

However, he also acknowledged the role of ‘Top Down’ branding that is driven through large campaigns, and celebrities as another source to build trust. Considerably, the startup launched its first brand marketing campaign #CreateImpact, in February, with a marketing budget of INR 100 Cr for CY22.

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.

Watch TMS 2022 Sessions