Edtech firm AEON Learning takes over Acadgild for $10 Mn

Edtech firm AEON Learning backed by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has acquired Acadgild, which offers high-end tech skills to mid-career IT professionals for about $10 million in an all-stock deal.

Following the deal, Vikalp Jain, co-founder of Acadgild, will join as AEON Learning as President.

"Acadgild’s leadership and strengths in delivering cutting-edge short-term IT skills complement Avagmah’s leadership in supporting universities in offering their long-term courses using technology. This acquisition offers us an opportunity to shape the future of the global workforce to produce readily deployable skilled talent" said Karthik K S, founder and CEO of AEON Learning, reported ET.

AEON Learning offers technology to universities for their courses through its platform Avagmah. It reaches to 22,000 students across 66 countries, with 20 per cent business originating from the US through its platform Avagmah.

It has raised a total $6.5 million from investors like Meena Ganesh, Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, Aptech and Hexaware founder Atul Nishar and Lion Rock Capital founding partner Srihari Kumar.

"This acquisition offers us a tremendous opportunity to shape the future of the global workforce to produce readily deployable skilled talent," Karthik added.

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Established in early 2015, Bengaluru-based Acadgild offers high-end tech skills to mid-career IT professionals in a hybrid model that combines live classes and an online platform for learning. This start-up has trained over 6,000 students through its professional certification training courses.

Acadgild received initial investment by venture capital firm Jupiter Capital, Enki and K Ganesh of GrowthStory and works with corporates like GE, Capgemini, Cognizant, Oracle and more.

Acadgild started off with its flagship programme, Android Development. It launched courses like Full Stack, Big Data, Front End Web Development, Business Analytics, Digital Marketing, Machine Learning with R, Cloud Computing, Spark and Core Java.

It works on a subscription-based model. For the more-intensive courses such as the job-guarantee courses, the course fee is Rs 15,000-70,000.

Acadgild: Website