Tech savvy Diwakar Chittora dreams to turn his 4-year old Intellipaat into $4B entity
In 2011, when Diwakar Chittora and Shilpa Jain were looking to update their knowledge on big data and Hadoop, they struggled a lot to find the right training institute. Even when they found one, the institute was asking for Rs 55,000 per person.
The duo then realized that almost all IT professionals struggle with this problem. Thus, in July 2011, they started Intellipaat, with the objective of providing high-end technology training at affordable prices.
Diwakar Chittora, CEO and Founder, Intellipaat, says,
It was a great journey, with more than 40 clients, 100 courses, and a 2.5 lakh user-base across the globe, in a span of four years. Some of our clients are Ericsson, Wipro, CTS, and TCS. I personally trained more than 30 corporates and 500 students across the globe, including many CEOs of the companies, on niche technologies.
The Jaipur-based firm has crafted an interesting growth trajectory for itself, till date. Currently, it has 40 clients on board, and has provided qualitative online training to over 15000 professionals, bringing about a sea change in their careers. With over 80 technological courses across a wide spectrum of domains, Intellipaat has been successful in including the aforementioned top companies in its client portfolio.
Monetizing the business
Started with a seed capital of Rs 50,000, the Jaipur based Intellipaat has crafted a growth trajectory for itself by offering 80 technological courses across a wide spectrum of domains. Now the startup is in talks with investors to raise a Series A funding of USD three to five million (Rs 19-32 crore).
Diwakar said that the the funding will enable Intellipaat’s global expansion plans, along with increasing the course catalogue from 125 to 500 e-learning courses, adding more clients to its network, and infusing the latest technologies, to stay ahead in the market.
Online training courses
Intellipaat offers both self-paced and instructor-led online courses. Currently, Intellipaat offers more than 100 online e-learning courses, focusing on niche technologies like Big Data, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Cloud and Business Courses like Hadoop, Building Recommendation engine , Python, Prince2, PMP, Tableau, Penthao, Qilkview, OBIEE, Talend, Spotfire, Jasper, MSBI, Cognos, SAS, Data Stage, Openstack, SAP HANA, Jaspersoft and many more. (very repetitive, (100 courses has been mentioned 3 times) and seems a little over informative. consider editing to your own liking)
Diwakar says,
All our courses are affordable, ranging from Rs 4000 to Rs 11000. We have monopoly in the market for the courses we teach, and no one in the e-learning space provides 24x7 support for life to their learners. A few market leaders are Lynda and Pluralsight, but their courses are at a very basic level.
Target learners
The target learners and customers of Intellipaat are from sectors like IT and Banking. The startup offers training on skill enhancement and career growth for every professional, regardless of how experienced they are. Diwakar stated that they recently have also launched a new set of courses for college graduates that focuses on employability.
Diwakar avers,
Our training team, along with industry experts who come with more than 18 years of experience, craft the course and its content themselves. The content and course material is customized, and cannot be plagiarized by anyone. We are in the process of tying up with engineering institutes.
According to Diwakar, Intellipaat has approximately 2,50,000 learners (these are the registered Intellipaat users, who sign up on Intellipaat to access the training content). Currently, the startup is aggressively focusing on promoting brand campaigns, to take the number of learners upto one million.
Diwakar also claims that Intellipaat has one lakh visitors per month and about 40 to 50 per cent of them revisit their site. The startup has a team of more than 40 employees, and will scale up to 60 in the next coming months.
Road Ahead
Intellipaat will add more courses in different technology categories, taking the total number to 200. In the next two years, the startup claims to become the one-stop solution for all professional training courses, and expand their reach to more than 50 countries. In terms of revenue, it expects to touch USD 1.5 to 2 million within one year.
Market overview
The education market is an evergreen one, and e-learning, in particular, has become a sunrise sector. There is a growing number of youngsters looking to the online space for easy access to learning and education. Growing at close to eight per cent YOY, the edutech sector today is full of quality players like Coursera, Vedantu, Cakart, and many others. By some estimates, the market for online education in India is expected to reach USD 40 billion by 2017 (Yourstory source).