Online education marketplace Udemy sets up Gurugram office to deepen India operations

Online learning marketplace Udemy, Inc. has established an employee hub in Gurugram as the San Francisco-headquartered firm looks to expand its operations in India.

The company expects the local presence to enable it to further enhance and localise the student and instructor experience in the Indian market, it said in a press statement. India is one of Udemy’s fastest-growing markets where revenue and students enrolments are seen doubling annually.

Founded in 2010 by Gagan Biyani, Eren Bali and Oktay Caglar, Udemy is an online learning platform that helps students across the globe master new skills through self-paced, on-demand courses while allowing experts to develop courses on a range of topics. For companies, Udemy for Business offers subscription access to over 3,000 business-relevant courses, learning analytics as well as a platform to host and distribute their own content in one central place. It also offers a customisable learning platform to governments to upskill workers across nations.

“Udemy’s rapid growth in India shows us the level of demand from students, instructors, and companies for affordable skills’ training,” said Gregg Coccari, chief executive, Udemy.

The company offers courses in over 50 languages. It has served over 30 million students with 42,000 instructors worldwide. Its enterprise client base includes Booking.com, Publicis Sapient, Pinterest, and Adidas. Globally, it has offices in Denver, Ireland, Turkey, and Brazil.

Udemy is backed by Naspers, Stripes Group, Norwest Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Lightbank, MHS Capital, Learn Capital, and 500 Startups.

The ed-tech sector has been one of the top attractors of venture capital funding in India.

Besides US-based Udacity and Coursera, Udemy competes with a handful of home-grown startups including Ronnie Screwvala's UpGrad, Sequoia Capital-backed Unacademy, and Bertelsmann India’s investee firm Eruditus. In the larger ed-tech space, Naspers-backed Byju’s is the largest online education venture in India. In its most recent funding round, Byju’s raised $4.76 million from existing investor New York-headquartered private equity firm General Atlantic at an approximate valuation of $3.85 billion.