At a time when a growing number of edtech companies are laying off employees in a bid to conserve cash and focus on profitability amid a funding winter, Great Learning is expecting to double its revenue to about Rs 1,000 crore for FY23. The edtech firm, which is focused on the professional and higher education segment also has plans to hire about 500 people in the next six months.
“Last year our revenue was over Rs 600 crore,” said Mohan Lakhamraju, founder and chief executive officer of Great Learning, in an interview. “This year also, we are growing strongly and are expecting to cross more than Rs 1,000 crore revenue.”
Lakhamraju who founded the company in 2013 said the firm had remained bootstrapped and profitable in the past. However, last year was an exception due to various factors and the firm couldn’t achieve profitability.
“We are on the path to breaking even this year,” he said.
Last year in July, edtech giant Byju’s acquired Singapore-headquartered Great Learning, in a transaction valued at $600 million comprising cash, stock and earnout. The acquisition marked Byju’s strong push into the professional upskilling and life-long learning space globally. This partnership has brought together Byju’s technology and content expertise with Great Learning’s professional courses. However Great Learning is operating as an independent subsidiary.
“We are looking at leveraging each other’s strengths to be able to serve our customers better,” said Lakhamraju. “For example, when we wanted to expand into Latin America, we leveraged Byju’s infrastructure there.”
Great Learning said it is expanding in regions such as India, North America, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It is focused on organic as well as inorganic growth, where it is planning to acquire various companies in these markets.
“We have made a couple of acquisitions and are looking at more (acquisitions) as well,” said Lakhamraju.
In May this year, Great Learning acquired Singapore-based Northwest Executive Education, a global provider of executive education programs. The value of the deal is reportedly $100 million. Early this year, it also acquired a talent recruitment automation platform, Superset.
Great Learning has been offering programs across various business, technology and interdisciplinary domains driving the digital economy. The plan is to now to also offer courses in areas such as renewable energy, sustainability and climate change. It is also partnering with various universities to help them provide online degree programmes by supporting them with, content, infrastructure and technology.
Prior to founding Great Learning in 2013, Lakhamraju was managing director, India, for top venture capital firm Tiger Global where he focused on investments in India and other emerging markets. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay and Stanford Business School, Lakhamraju spent close to 10 years in Silicon Valley. He was an entrepreneur helping build a software-as-a-service company called Stratify (now a division of HP) and then as a venture capitalist at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ).
Great Learning has now already delivered over 110 million hours of learning to hundreds of thousands of learners across the globe. It is present in over 170 countries and has a total learner base of more than 6.1 million individual learners. The firm has over 2000 employees. It offers over 1300 industry-relevant courses and has 19 educational partners and 200 enterprise partnerships. Some of its clients include the Reserve Bank of India, Wipro, Bajaj Finance and Bank of America.
When asked about the mood in the edtech industry, at a time when a growing number of edtech companies are laying off employees amid a funding winter, Lakhamraju said the “mood is definitely soberer” than it was before. During the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, edtech sector created a lot of interest and many companies experimented in the space. “Edtech got acceleration during Covid and now it’s back to growing steadily,” said Lakhamraju.
He said there are a lot of companies and entrepreneurs with no expertise in education who tapped edtech as it became attractive during Covid-19. A lot of investors were pumping capital into this space and there was cheap money available. Edtech firms were also focused on ‘growth at all costs’ and ‘hired crazily.
He said that edtech companies are now right-sizing the workforce and focusing on the core aspects of the business. They are also cutting down their ‘moonshot’ projects and new initiatives.
He said the companies that have spent a lot of time figuring out how education works and delivers outcomes, are still doing well.
“We haven’t fired anybody in our entire history and nor do we have any plans to do that,” said Lakhamraju.
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