upGrad acqui-hires product management community startup CohortPlus

Online education venture upGrad has acqui-hired Bengaluru-based CohortPlus, a community platform focused at Product Management and Data Science for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2015 by Srinivasan Narayan, CohortPlus is an online community, which brings together like-minded career aspirants on a single community platform, where they can network with each other, ask and clarify doubts, and be abreast of the latest events in the field of data science and product management.

Its member base includes 31,100+ professionals from around the world from companies like Google, Adobe, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Uber, Amazon, Practo, Zomato, etc. Members can post their questions and get various perspectives from industry professionals and can also get assistance for job interviews.

CohortPlus had raised angel investment from Manish Maheshwari (MD, Twitter India), Alok Mittal (Founder, Indifi), and Sujatha Kumar (Head of Marketing, Visa) in 2015.

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India has seen more than 400 percent rise in demand for data science professionals across varied industry sectors at a time when the supply of such talent is witnessing a slow growth, said Talent Supply Index (TSI) by Belong.

Having grown organically to more than 31,000 community members, CohortPlus claims to be bringing rich consumer insights, which will enable upGrad to enhance its offerings for the learners, upGrad said in a statement.

“Employees in India are looking forward to picking up new-age skills to make themselves more relevant in the current workforce. upGrad’s highly engaging online learning solution along with CohortPlus’s deep penetration in the community of Data Scientists and Product Managers, will allow us to reach a much larger and relevant audience,” said Ronnie Screwvala and Mayank Kumar, Co-founders, upGrad in a joint statement.

It is worth noting that CohortPlus is upGrad's third acqui-hire in the past three years. It acquired Gurugram-based job skilling platform Acadview Software in October last year, and before that it acqui-hired  Pyoopil Education Technologies in 2016, a mobile-based SaaS (Software-as-a-service) product used by companies to deploy online training.

Started in early 2015 by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar, Phalgun Kompalli, and Ravijot Chugh, upGrad has introduced 35 programmes in areas such as data science, technology, and management, and has a paid learner base of 13,000.

It has also partnered with academic institutes like BITS Pilani, IIIT-Bangalore, Cambridge Judge Business School of Executive Education, and MICA to develop its course content. upGrad has collaborations with companies like Google, Flipkart, Gramener, and Oyo for practical learning experience.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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