Startup Deep Dive : Eruditus — the executive-education startup selling Harvard’s brand at a $3 billion valuation

In 2015, an Eruditus executive-education programme in India advertised for months and enrolled twenty-one paying students. Nine years later, in October 2024, a group led by the private equity firm TPG valued the same company at $3 billion.

That gap — between a classroom nobody showed up to and a company investors now compare with listed Indian conglomerates — is the whole Eruditus story. It sells no degrees of its own. It builds no campuses. What it sells is access to Harvard, MIT, Columbia and roughly eighty other university brands, packaged into paid certificate courses for working professionals, and it has turned that arrangement into one of India’s largest edtech businesses by revenue: Rs 3,733 crore ($448 million) in the year to June 2024, as reported by Eruditus to India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs and analysed by Entrackr in April 2025.

Quick facts

What they do

Eruditus does not teach. It licenses teaching. The company partners with more than eighty universities — Harvard Business School, MIT, Columbia Business School, Wharton, INSEAD and, increasingly, Indian institutions such as IIT Kozhikode and IIM Lucknow — and turns their faculty and course design into paid, cohort-based online programmes sold to working professionals under the Emeritus brand, and to more senior executives and enterprises under the original Eruditus name. A learner pays anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a short course to several thousand for a longer diploma-style programme, sits through live sessions with real faculty in a small cohort, and comes away with a certificate that carries the university’s name rather than a university degree. The company also runs a separate, unrelated business: iD Tech, a Silicon Valley STEM and coding-camp operator for school-age children, bought in 2021.

The origin

Ashwin Damera, a chartered accountant from a middle-class family with no history in business, and Chaitanya Kalipatnapu, a BITS Pilani graduate who had worked at Sun Microsystems before an MBA at INSEAD, started Eruditus in Mumbai in 2010, as reported by Forbes India in its 2021 profile of Damera. The insight was not technological. It was that global executive-education demand — Damera has pointed to the multi-trillion-dollar size of the worldwide higher-education market as the opportunity he was chasing — vastly outstripped the number of seats top business schools could physically offer. Eruditus’s first product, according to the startup’s own account carried by StartupTalky, was a ten-day in-person classroom programme delivered by INSEAD and IIM Ahmedabad faculty to Indian professionals with five to ten years of work experience, built without technology or venture funding. Growth in the early years came from stacking short, faculty-led modules that could later be recombined into longer certificate and diploma programmes, a content-reuse approach that let the company multiply its course catalogue without commissioning new material for every offering.

The struggle years

The company’s defining setback came in 2015. After months of marketing a three-month executive programme in India, Eruditus enrolled only twenty-one participants, an outcome StartupTalky’s account of the company’s history attributes directly to Damera. Elite faculty, it turned out, was not enough on its own; the venture needed a stronger brand and a way to reach learners at scale rather than city by city. That failure is what pushed the founders online: 2015 is the year Emeritus was launched as the company’s digital arm, built around what Damera has called a “small private online course,” or SPOC — live faculty sessions and a curated cohort rather than an open, unmonitored massive online course.

The second stretch of difficulty came almost a decade later, once the pandemic-era online-learning boom reversed. In June 2022, as reported by YourStory, Eruditus laid off around 40 employees from its talent-acquisition and marketing teams, joining Indian edtech peers such as Unacademy, WhiteHat Jr and Vedantu, which collectively cut more than 1,800 jobs that year. The pain deepened through 2023: edtech funding in India fell 88.9%, from $2.5 billion in 2022 to $0.3 billion in 2023, and the sector recorded roughly 4,700 layoffs that year, according to Entrepreneur’s 2023 round-up of the industry. Eruditus’s own valuation was not spared. Inc42 reported in January 2024 that SoftBank and CPP Investments were in talks to buy roughly $70 million of secondary shares at about $2.5 billion — a 20% discount to the company’s 2021 mark — and by August 2024, according to the same publication, a new primary round led by TPG was being discussed at up to $2.3 billion, with a floor of $1.8 billion if performance milestones were missed.

The turning point

The single event that put Eruditus on the radar of global private equity was its August 2021 fundraise. On 12 August 2021, Emeritus announced a $650 million round, a mix of new primary capital and secondary share sales, led by Accel and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and joined by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Leeds Illuminate and Prosus, alongside existing backers Sequoia Capital India and Bertelsmann, per the company’s own newsroom release. That single round pushed Eruditus’s valuation to $3.2 billion — four times the roughly $800 million valuation it had carried just a year earlier, at its August 2020 Series D, a jump also confirmed independently in Forbes India’s 2021 profile of the company. Before: a Series D company worth $800 million in the middle of a pandemic that had just made remote learning briefly fashionable. After: a $3.2 billion “decacorn-adjacent” outlier, one of the most richly valued edtech companies to come out of India, riding a wave that would crest within eighteen months and then recede.

The money behind it

Eruditus’s capital-raising history, tracked round by round by StartupTalky, runs from an undisclosed 2016 Series A through a $8.16 million Series B in April 2017 (Bertelsmann India Investments), a $40 million Series C in November 2018 (Peak XV Partners, then Sequoia Capital India), a $113 million Series D in August 2020 (Leeds Illuminate, Prosus Ventures) and the $650 million Series E of August 2021. In March 2022, the company added a $350 million debt facility from CPP Investments, used in part to fund acquisitions, and in October 2024 it closed a $150 million Series F led by TPG’s The Rise Fund, with SoftBank, Accel, Leeds Illuminate, CPP Investments and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative all returning, at a $3 billion valuation, as reported independently by TechStartups.com and iTiger on 18 October 2024. Taken together, that is well over $1.2 billion in disclosed equity and debt through 2022 alone, per StartupTalky’s tally, plus the further $150 million raised in 2024 — north of $1.35 billion in total disclosed capital.

Three backers shaped the company at three different moments. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Accel supplied the growth capital and the credibility that produced the 2021 valuation spike, at the peak of pandemic-driven demand for remote learning. CPP Investments, the manager of Canada’s national pension fund, first arrived as a secondary buyer in 2021 and then became a lender, providing the $350 million debt facility in 2022 that funded Eruditus’s $200 million all-cash acquisition of iD Tech, a US STEM-education company for school-age children, without diluting existing shareholders. TPG’s The Rise Fund, arriving in 2024 after the down-round talks, effectively repriced the company for a slower-growth, pre-IPO phase and pushed it toward its current plan: redomiciling from Singapore to India, with the company reportedly in discussions with Big Four accounting firms on the process, ahead of a possible BSE or NSE listing, according to Inc42’s reporting from January 2024 and October 2024.

How it makes money

The commercial engine is a revenue-share partnership. Universities supply the faculty, the curriculum design input and, most importantly, the brand and the eventual certificate; Eruditus supplies the technology platform, learner recruitment, marketing spend and cohort operations, and the two sides split the revenue a course generates. Public reporting on the exact split ratio is not reliably available, and this piece has left the number out rather than repeat an unverified figure. What is disclosed, from Eruditus’s own FY22 financial filings as analysed by Entrackr, is the scale of the payout: the company paid $108 million to university partners that year, up 96.7% year on year, while employee costs — $262 million, including $149 million in non-cash stock appreciation rights — made up 44.1% of total costs, and marketing was the next largest single line. In that year, Entrackr calculated, Eruditus spent $2.42 to earn every $1 of operating revenue, a ratio that has since improved sharply as the company cut marketing and other operating spend.

The part people tend to get wrong is what the credential actually is. A learner who completes an Emeritus programme with, say, MIT or Columbia receives a certificate of completion co-branded with that university, not a university degree and not matriculation as a full-time student there. The prestige transfers; the enrolment status does not. That distinction is central to the entire category — it is also the fault line that sank 2U, a US peer that ran a similar revenue-share model for full online degree programmes and filed for bankruptcy in July 2024 after a marquee partner, the University of Southern California, ended its relationship in 2023, as documented on Wikipedia’s account of the company’s collapse.

The numbers

Figures below are as reported in Eruditus’s regulatory filings and analysed by Entrackr; fiscal years run to 30 June. Note that the loss metric changes in FY24: Entrackr’s FY24 report discloses only an adjusted EBITDA loss, not the net loss figure used for earlier years, so the two are not directly comparable.

Two things stand out. Revenue nearly quadrupled from FY21 to FY24, but the company also deferred Rs 800 crore ($96 million) of collected revenue into FY25, per Entrackr’s April 2025 analysis, meaning the FY24 top line understates cash already collected. And the loss line, however it is measured, has shrunk every year since FY22 as Eruditus cut marketing spend (down 18.9% year on year in FY24, to Rs 1,007 crore) and other operating costs (down 32.2%, to Rs 1,045 crore).

Where the money comes from

Eruditus is a US-revenue business wearing an Indian-startup label. In FY22, the last year for which a geographic split was disclosed in filings analysed by Entrackr, the United States accounted for 48.77% of operating revenue ($119.6 million) and the Asia-Pacific region 22% ($54.18 million), with the remainder spread across other geographies not individually broken out in that filing. That is the surprise for readers who assume an Indian-founded edtech company sells mostly to Indian learners: its largest market, by a wide margin, has consistently been working professionals in the United States paying in dollars for a Harvard, MIT or Wharton-branded certificate, with India and the rest of Asia-Pacific a large but secondary contributor.

The risks

The clearest risk is partner concentration and partner defection. The entire model depends on universities agreeing to lend their names and faculty time; if a marquee partner walks away, as USC did to 2U in 2023, both the revenue and the credibility of the remaining catalogue take a hit, and Wikipedia’s account of 2U’s subsequent 2024 bankruptcy filing shows how quickly that kind of exit can compound with debt to force a restructuring. Eruditus runs a broader, more diversified partner roster than 2U did, but the underlying mechanism — one prestige-brand exit denting the whole platform’s pulling power — is the same.

The second risk is macro and discretionary-spend sensitivity. Executive-education purchases, whether paid by the learner or an employer’s training budget, are among the first line items cut when corporate belts tighten or when a hiring slowdown reduces the perceived payoff of a certificate; the 2022–2023 downturn that forced Eruditus’s own layoffs and a sector-wide 88.9% funding collapse, per Entrepreneur’s 2023 reporting, is the live example of that sensitivity playing out.

The third is execution risk around the planned reverse-flip and IPO. Moving a company’s parent entity from Singapore to India involves tax authorities, the Reserve Bank of India and multiple regulators, and Inc42 reported in January 2024 that Eruditus was still in early discussions with professional-services firms on how to structure the move, with no announced timeline as of the funding events analysed in this piece; a redomiciliation that stalls or triggers an unexpected tax bill would delay the listing path the company’s most recent investors are underwriting.

The takeaway

Eruditus’s most transferable lesson is not about edtech at all. It is that a brand-arbitrage business — selling access to someone else’s reputation, at a fee, to a market that reputation alone cannot reach — can scale enormously, but it inherits its ceiling and its fragility from the partner brands it rents rather than owns. The company’s growth came from convincing eighty-plus universities that a revenue-share partner could sell more seats than they could sell alone; its near-death in 2015 came from the opposite discovery, that faculty quality without a distribution brand sells almost nothing. Every subsequent decision — the online pivot, the SPOC format, the acquisitions, the current move toward an India listing — has been an attempt to own more of the distribution engine while relying on partners for the credibility it cannot manufacture itself.

Frequently asked questions

Is Eruditus the same company as Emeritus?

Eruditus Learning Solutions is the parent company, founded in 2010 for in-person executive education; Emeritus is the online consumer brand it launched in 2015, and the two names are often used interchangeably in press coverage and company communications.

Do Eruditus certificates count as degrees from Harvard, MIT or other partner universities?

No. Learners receive a certificate of completion co-branded with the partner university, not a university degree, and they are not enrolled as matriculated students of that university.

What is Eruditus’s current valuation?

$3 billion, as of its October 2024 Series F round led by TPG’s The Rise Fund, down from a peak of $3.2 billion in August 2021; interim discussions in 2024 had reportedly floated figures as low as $1.8-2.3 billion before the round closed.

Is Eruditus profitable?

Not on a net-income basis based on available disclosures. Its FY24 adjusted EBITDA loss was Rs 69 crore (~$8.3 million), an 83.45% improvement on FY23’s adjusted EBITDA loss of Rs 417 crore, but a net profit figure has not been disclosed in the filings reviewed for this piece.

Is Eruditus planning an IPO?

The company has said it intends to eventually list on an Indian exchange (BSE or NSE) and has begun the process of shifting its parent entity’s registration from Singapore to India ahead of that, but as of the reporting reviewed here it had not announced a fixed IPO date.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Forbes India, “Eruditus and Ashwin Damera: A masterclass in wealth creation” (2021)
• StartupTalky, “Success Story of Eruditus Executive Education” (accessed September 2026)
• Emeritus Newsroom, “Emeritus Supercharges Mission to Make High Quality Education Affordable and Accessible Through $650 Million Capital Raise” (August 2021)
• YourStory, “Edtech unicorn Eruditus lets go of 40 employees” (June 2022)
• Entrackr, “Eruditus posts $131 Mn revenue in FY21, outstanding losses past $351 Mn” (March 2022)
• Entrackr, “Eruditus emerged 2nd largest edtech firm in terms of scale in FY22” (April 2023)
• Entrackr, “Eruditus’ revenue crosses Rs 3,300 Cr in FY23; losses dwindle 66%” (January 2024)
• Entrackr, “Eruditus clocks Rs 3,733 Cr revenue in FY24, narrows losses by 83%” (April 2025)
• Inc42, “Edtech Unicorn Eruditus Mulls Reverse Flipping To India Ahead Of Potential IPO” (January 2024)
• Inc42, “Eruditus Bags $150 Mn Led By The Rise Fund” (October 2024)
• TechStartups.com, “Indian edtech startup Eruditus raises $150 million in funding at a $3 billion valuation” (October 2024)
• iTiger, “India’s Eruditus raises $150 mln in TPG-led funding round” (October 2024)
• Entrepreneur India, “Edtech in 2023: A Year Of Layoffs and Funding Crunch” (2023)
• Wikipedia, “2U (company)” (accessed September 2026)

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