The Ed-tech sector has seen tremendous growth during times of pandemic. This sector had a busy time since students have transitioned to online educations, academic classes, and skill upgradation have also taken place online. The upGgrad is one of the companies to have increased in growth during the Lockdown period. It is also India’s largest online higher education company. The core team of the company is Ronnie Screwvala, Phalgun Kompalli, Mayank Kumar, Rohit Dhar, and Puneet Tanwar.
Bijoya Ghosh, founder, and CEO of Adgully spoke to the co-founder of the upgrade, Phalgun Kompalli as part of special knowledge series, powered by mFilterlt to decode the success mantra of upgrade and the road ahead for the ed-tech sector. Since the COVID outbreak in the last 8 to 9 months, there were few changes that they had to go through because of the pandemic. During the pre-COVID, they had a workforce of 600 people and now they have 2200 people. It was a challenge for them to make sure to grow and measure the organization without compromising on the culture of the company. A lot of their university partners have reached out to them because they didn’t know what to do during the pandemic. They couldn’t find the right execution to teach the students. They have helped around 200 universities and guided them to online classes.
Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 people have changed to online learning to improve their skills to pursue their desired courses. Before the pandemic, they had a portfolio of 30 programs and now they have about 110 programs. They claim that COVID-19 hasn’t caused inflection. It did not help them to grow but it made a change of making online learning more acceptable compared to the year before the pandemic. These realizations of the importance of online learning have made the company to break their objective which they thought that it would take three years to achieve, which was achieved in 6 months. They are planning to have a partnership with multiple universities to accelerate their growth and launching more programs. The objective that they thought that it would take them 5 years to achieve, it took 9 months. The foundation for internal expansion has also been laid out.
