As Covid Eats Up Travel, Yatra Eyes Edtech Space With upGrad Deal

Yatra.com diversified beyond travel after inking a deal with edtech startup upGrad’s B2B arm upGrad Enterprise to enable learning and skill development courses to its corporate clients.

upGrad Enterprise will work closely with Yatra’s corporate and SME clientele to skill them on deployment-ready workforce within 6 months. They claim that the training will reduce attrition and align L&D plan with growth strategy.

Yatra.com’s cofounder and CEO Dhruv Shringi said, “We are excited to join forces with upGrad to provide a platform to our clients who are looking to develop employees’ potential specific to their businesses or a sector. This unique partnership further paves our way to become an end to end business solution provider to our clients.”

upGrad’s cofounder and MD, Mayank Kumar, added, that the skill-gap in the talent pool has sprung up as a major barrier for enterprises looking to adopt technology across vertices.

Last month, Yatra closed its underwritten public offering at $11.5 Mn. Earlier in June 4, the travel aggregator canceled the ongoing agreement with US software firm Ebix Inc. Yatra has filed a plea seeking ‘substantial’ damages for Ebix’s alleged breach of deal terms. In 2019, Ebix had agreed to buy Yatra at an enterprise value of $337.8 Mn.

Ronnie Screwvala’s edtech platform upGrad’s agreement with Yatra is also in alignment with its plans to enter in the $1 Bn+ corporate training segment. As part of its expansion, it had acqui-hired Delhi-based SaaS platform Pyoopil Education Technologies in 2016.

Meanwhile, Telangana government’s non-profit organisation Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK) has partnered with Coursera, to train 50,000 unemployed youth during the Covid-19 crisis. The partnership is part of Coursera’s global roll-out of the Workforce Recovery Initiative, where any state and country can provide unemployed workers with free access to online learning.

According to a survey jointly published by Google India and research firm Kantar, small and medium businesses (SMB) are under pressure to embrace technology and adopt more innovative ways of operation. Among the 400 business across 16 cities who were respondents in the survey, 93% were facing customer-related challenges, while 63% reported a loss of revenue due to low demand. Close to 58% of the business were struggling to meet their fixed costs.

The survey showed that while 60% of the respondents are willing to invest in digital marketing solutions, the remaining 40% want to seek help from technology firms for training which could help them stay afloat during the pandemic. Further, 79% were interested in learning about digital marketing solutions in regional languages.

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