Eruditus enters unicorn club with $650 Mn round led by Accel and SoftBank

Edtech company Eruditus has become the latest entrant to the coveted club of unicorns. The Mumbai-based company, which offers executive courses, has raised $650 million in a new round led by Accel Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund II.

With this, the company has become the 23rd startup in 2021 and to date fourth from the edtech segment to turn into a unicorn. Last week, UpGrad attained this status where Byju’s and Unacademy are already the market leaders.

According to Eruditus, the latest round, possibly Series E, is a mix of primary and secondary in which the company has reached a post-money valuation of $3.2 billion. This is an almost four-fold jump in the company’s valuation which was valued at around $800 million during its last fundraise of $113 million Series D a year ago.

The fresh proceeds will help Eruditus in acquisitions across India and overseas.

Led by Chaitanya Kalipatnapu and Ashwin Damera, 11-year-old Eruditus offers executive courses for working professionals in partnerships with MIT, Columbia, Harvard, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, IIT, IIM and others. The firm has launched more than 100 courses in multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin.

The company claims to clock about 20% of its overall users from India while 35% of it comes from the US. The rest of the users come from Europe, Latin America and other geographies.

According to an ET report, Damera controls 40% stake in the company. In August 2020, Damera’s stakeholding in the company was estimated at around 55.09%.

For FY21, the company claimed to have recorded $185 million in revenue and aims to close FY22 with $500 million.

Where all hyper funded startups including Byju’s and Unacademy are on an acquisition spree and have collectively taken over two dozen startups in the past couple of years, Eruditus made its first acquisition with Silicon Valley-based iDTech for $200 million to expand its offering in the K12 space.