In July 2026, Imarticus Learning — a Mumbai professional-education company that has never taken more than a few million dollars in any single funding round — agreed to pay ₹800 crore ($83.3 million) for a Singapore institute, a cheque bigger than the ₹750 crore it hopes to raise in its own initial public offering. That is the contradiction at the heart of this company: a 14-year-old upskilling business that says it has been profitable for seven to eight years, and that has largely funded its growth from its own balance sheet rather than venture capital.
Its FY25 numbers were modest by Indian edtech standards — ₹205 crore in revenue and ₹14 crore in EBITDA — next to rivals valued in billions of dollars. Yet it is the one queuing up for a stock-exchange listing while several better-funded peers have written off losses or shut down. How a bootstrapped-leaning finance-training shop became an acquirer with an ₹800 crore chequebook is the story below.
Quick facts
| Company | Imarticus Learning Private Limited |
| Founded | 2012 (incorporated 9 May 2012, Mumbai) |
| Founder(s) | Nikhil Barshikar and Sonya Hooja |
| Businesses | Job-linked professional education in finance, analytics, technology and management (B2C and B2B “Prodegree” corporate training); a degree arm, Imarticus School of Finance & Business; and, since July 2026, an international campus network via Singapore’s BELLS Institute |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹205 crore in FY25, up 16% year-on-year |
| Latest FY profit/loss | EBITDA of ₹14 crore in FY25, up 100% year-on-year; net profit margin reported at 6.57% as of FY25 |
| Listed | Private; DRHP planned for Q3 FY27 (Jan-Mar 2027), not filed as of September 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported between $123 million (April 2023, post Series C) and $150 million (April 2025) — unconfirmed by the company |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Nikhil Barshikar, Founder and CEO; backers include BLinC Invest, CBA Capital, Hero Corp, Global Ivy Ventures and Caspian |
What they do
Imarticus Learning sells job-linked training in finance, data analytics, technology and management to two different buyers. The first is individual learners — mostly graduates and early-career professionals — who pay for career-launch programmes and certifications. The second, larger by volume, is corporates, who buy cohort training under the “Prodegree” brand for their own employees or new hires, in partnership with firms such as EY, Genpact, HDFC Bank and Motilal Oswal. Across both groups the company puts roughly 40,000 people through its programmes each year: an estimated 10,000-15,000 individual (B2C) learners and about 30,000 corporate (B2B) trainees. Beyond short courses, it also runs a degree-granting arm, the Imarticus School of Finance & Business, and — following its July 2026 acquisition of Singapore’s BELLS Institute of Higher Learning — a network of physical campuses outside India for the first time.
The origin
Nikhil Barshikar spent nearly two decades in investment banking before starting Imarticus Learning, including senior roles at Lehman Brothers, where he helped set up its India operations, and at Nomura Securities. It was inside those trading floors that he found the gap he would later build a company around: banks were hiring finance graduates who, in his account, had almost no practical grounding in how investment banking actually worked, and the firms themselves had neither the time nor the systems to train them from scratch. Business schools taught theory; employers needed people who could work from day one. In 2012, with co-founder Sonya Hooja, he set up Imarticus Learning in Mumbai as an investment-banking training institute meant to sit in that gap — training people to the standard employers wanted, before they were hired rather than after.
The struggle years
The first version of Imarticus Learning was a classroom-only business. For close to three years after its 2012 founding, it grew city by city — Mumbai, then Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Coimbatore, Hyderabad and Pune — entirely through physical training centres, a model that is slow and capital-intensive to scale nationally. It was only in 2015 that the company took its courses online, a full three years after founding, by which point competitors born online-first had a structural head start on reach.
The second, longer strain came from the market rather than from any single internal misstep. After a $2 million Series B from CBA Capital in August 2018, Imarticus Learning went five years without a fresh institutional round, a period that spanned the pandemic-era edtech boom and its subsequent bust. Indian edtech went from record funding in 2020-21 to a wave of layoffs and shutdowns by 2022, as investors that had bankrolled aggressive, loss-making growth pulled back hard. Imarticus Learning’s own founder has said the lesson of that period was to internalise EBITDA-positive growth and a sustainable cost of acquiring customers rather than chase growth at any cost — an implicit admission that the temptation to overspend, which sank several peers, was one the company had to actively resist rather than avoid by design.
The turning point
The clearest inflection point came in April 2023. On 29 April that year, Imarticus Learning closed a $5.6 million Series C round led by Hero Corp and Global Ivy Ventures, reportedly valuing the company at $123 million — its first new institutional capital since 2018, arriving just as the broader edtech downturn was at its worst and several well-funded rivals were cutting staff or closing down. Within days of that round, on 6 April 2023, it also announced the acquisition of Hero Mindmine, the Hero Group’s corporate sales-training arm, for an undisclosed sum. Before that month, Imarticus Learning had grown almost entirely organically, adding two smaller acquisitions in 2022 (Skillenza and StartOnboard) on the side. After it, acquisitions became the primary growth lever: Hero Mindmine in 2023, MyCaptain for ₹50 crore in May 2025, and BELLS Institute of Higher Learning for ₹800 crore in July 2026 — a sequence that took the company from a single-product finance-training shop to a multi-brand skilling group with, by 2026, close to 1,800 employees before the BELLS deal and over 1,100 combined afterward across India and Singapore.
The money behind it
- Seed, March 2016: $1 million led by Blinc Advisors (now BLinC Invest) along with angel investors, the company’s first outside capital, four years after founding.
- Series B, August 2018: $2 million from venture fund CBA Capital, aimed at accelerating expansion.
- Series C, April 2023: $5.6 million led by Hero Corp and Global Ivy Ventures, reportedly valuing the company at $123 million post-money.
- Latest reported valuation: as high as $150 million as of April 2025, based on funding-tracker estimates — a figure that conflicts with the $123 million Series C mark, so both are given here since the company has not confirmed either.
- Total disclosed external funding: reported anywhere between $10 million and $15.7 million depending on the data provider, reflecting several early rounds where exact amounts were not disclosed.
- Repeat backers: Caspian and BLinC Invest appear across multiple funding rounds tracked for the company, alongside Global Ivy Ventures.
- Self-funded scale-up: the founder has said growth since 2023 — including a run of acquisitions — has been financed mainly from internal profit rather than fresh equity, positioning any IPO proceeds as “acquisition currency” rather than a rescue for the balance sheet.
How it makes money
Money comes in two ways: individual learners pay course or programme fees, typically upfront or through EMI-style plans, for career-launch and certification tracks; corporates pay contract fees for cohort training sold under the Prodegree brand, often tied to hiring or onboarding pipelines at partner firms. In FY25, finance-related programmes made up about 40% of revenue, analytics about 30%, and management and HR courses the remaining 30%.
On costs, the largest lines are instructor and content delivery, career-services and placement teams, and marketing. Reported FY25 EBITDA of ₹14 crore against ₹205 crore of revenue implies an EBITDA margin of roughly 7% — thin, but the point the company emphasises is that it is positive and growing, doubling year-on-year, at a time when comparable-stage peers were still burning cash.
The part most outsiders get wrong is the acquisition model. Imarticus Learning is often filed under “online learning,” but roughly half of its customers are acquired through non-digital channels — direct corporate relationships, campus tie-ups and referrals — rather than paid digital marketing, and its cost of acquiring a customer through those offline channels runs at about 40% of the cost of acquiring one digitally. That is closer to a relationship-and-placement business wearing an edtech label than a performance-marketing-led online course seller.
The numbers
Only two fiscal years of revenue and profitability figures for Imarticus Learning could be independently verified in public reporting at the time of writing; earlier-year figures circulating on data aggregators could not be corroborated against a primary source and have been left out rather than guessed at. Figures are in ₹ crore.
| Metric | FY24 | FY25 |
| Revenue | ₹177 crore | ₹205 crore (+16% YoY) |
| EBITDA | Not independently disclosed | ₹14 crore (+100% YoY) |
| Net profit margin | Not disclosed | Reported at 6.57% as of FY25 |
- FY25 revenue: ₹205 crore, up 16% on FY24’s ₹177 crore.
- FY25 EBITDA: ₹14 crore, up 100% year-on-year — meaning FY24 EBITDA was roughly half that level on the same reported growth rate.
- FY26 target (management guidance, not an actual result): revenue of ₹300-320 crore, as stated by the company in April 2025.
- Employee count: 1,793 as of March 2026, up 9.8% year-on-year, before the BELLS acquisition added further headcount in Singapore.
Where the money comes from
- By programme category (FY25): finance 40% of revenue; analytics 30%; management and HR courses 30%.
- By customer type: corporate/B2B trainees (about 30,000 a year) outnumber individual B2C learners (roughly 10,000-15,000 a year) by roughly two to three times.
- By acquisition channel: about 50% of customers come through non-digital routes — direct corporate and campus outreach, referrals — rather than paid digital marketing.
- By geography: overwhelmingly India-based until July 2026, when the ₹800 crore purchase of Singapore’s BELLS Institute of Higher Learning added seven training centres and access to a network of roughly 150,000 BELLS alumni across Southeast Asia, alongside Imarticus Learning’s own claimed base of over 1 million learners trained since inception.
- Combined post-acquisition scale: more than 1,100 employees and over 25 offices across India and Singapore, and a claimed 3,500-plus hiring partners between the two organisations.
The surprise is in the mix: a company still widely known for finance and investment-banking training now earns as much from management and HR courses as from analytics, and its two largest-ever transactions were not in its founding category at all — a creative-careers platform (MyCaptain) and an international higher-education institute (BELLS) — suggesting the business is becoming a roll-up of adjacent skilling brands rather than a single finance-training product stretched wider.
The risks
- Valuation-versus-scale gap ahead of listing: Imarticus Learning’s own reported private valuation of $123-150 million sits far below listed and late-stage peers such as Unacademy (reported at $3.44 billion) and Eruditus (reported at $2.9 billion). Pricing a roughly ₹1,000 crore-plus IPO off ₹205 crore of revenue and ₹14 crore of EBITDA will require public investors — already wary after a mixed run of edtech listings — to accept a valuation re-rating the private market has not yet tested at this scale.
- Acquisition-integration risk at a new scale: the company has made roughly six acquisitions since 2021, but the July 2026 purchase of BELLS Institute, at ₹800 crore, is nearly four times its own FY25 annual revenue and its first cross-border deal, bringing a different regulator, alumni base and market into a company that has so far only integrated domestic, similarly-sized targets.
- Concentration in corporate finance-hiring cycles: finance-linked programmes were about 40% of FY25 revenue, sold in significant part to corporate partners such as EY, Genpact, HDFC Bank and Motilal Oswal; a slowdown in banking and financial-services hiring or training budgets would hit a plurality of revenue directly rather than being cushioned by an unrelated segment.
The takeaway
The lesson in Imarticus Learning’s path is less about the training business itself than about what staying profitable through a bad market buys a company later. Because it resisted the growth-at-any-cost funding many edtech peers took in 2020-21, and kept EBITDA positive through the downturn that followed, it was still solvent and creditworthy when the market turned tight again — able, in 2023, to raise fresh capital cheaply and start acquiring while distressed and shuttered competitors could not. By 2026 that discipline had compounded into the ability to outbid better-funded rivals for a strategic asset, funding an ₹800 crore acquisition largely off its own books rather than needing to ask a market for it. In a capital-scarce sector, being the boring, profitable option is itself a form of optionality: it turns a company into a buyer of opportunities instead of a seller of promises to investors.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Imarticus Learning, and when?
Imarticus Learning was founded in 2012 in Mumbai by Nikhil Barshikar, a former investment banker with Lehman Brothers and Nomura Securities, along with co-founder Sonya Hooja.
Is Imarticus Learning profitable?
The company says it has been profitable for the last seven to eight years. Its most recent disclosed figure is an EBITDA of ₹14 crore in FY25, up 100% year-on-year, on revenue of ₹205 crore.
How much funding has Imarticus Learning raised?
Disclosed rounds include a $1 million seed round in March 2016 led by Blinc Advisors, a $2 million Series B in August 2018 from CBA Capital, and a $5.6 million Series C in April 2023 led by Hero Corp and Global Ivy Ventures. Total external funding is reported at between $10 million and $15.7 million depending on the tracker, since some amounts were never disclosed.
What is Imarticus Learning’s IPO plan?
The company has said it is targeting an IPO of around ₹750 crore, combining a fresh issue and an offer for sale, with IIFL appointed as investment banker. As of September 2026 it had not yet filed its draft red herring prospectus, with a Q3 FY27 (January-March 2027) filing window indicated.
What was Imarticus Learning’s largest acquisition?
Its largest disclosed acquisition is the July 2026 purchase of Singapore’s BELLS Institute of Higher Learning for approximately ₹800 crore, its first international deal and the biggest single transaction in the company’s history — larger than its own targeted IPO size.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Business Standard, “IPO-bound ed-tech firm Imarticus Learning acquires MyCaptain in ₹50 cr deal”, May 2025
- Business Standard, “Edtech firm Imarticus Learning to file DRHP in 4-5 months for IPO plans”, March 2025
- Inc42, “Profitable Edtech Imarticus Learning Preps INR 750 Cr IPO”, April 2025
- Inc42, “IPO-Bound Imarticus Learning Acquires MyCaptain For INR 50 Cr”, May 2025
- Inc42, “IPO-Bound Imarticus Learning Acquires Singapore’s BELLS Institute For ₹800 Cr”, August 2026
- Bar and Bench, “Imarticus Learning acquires Singapore’s BELLS Institute of Higher Learning for ₹800 crore”, July 2026
- YourStory, “Imarticus Learning acquires Singapore’s Bells Institute of Higher Learning for Rs 800 Cr”, July 2026
- Entrepreneur India, “₹800 Crore Deal Accelerates Imarticus Learning’s Global Education Expansion”, August 2026
- Entrackr, “Imarticus Learning acquires HeroMindmine”, April 2023
- Entrackr, “Edtech startup Imarticus Learning bags $2 Mn in Series B round from CBA Capital”, August 2018
- DealStreetAsia, “India: Imarticus Learning raises $1m led by Blinc Advisors, others”, March 2016
- Tracxn, Imarticus Learning funding and investors profile, accessed September 2026
- Tofler, Imarticus Learning Private Limited company and financial profile, accessed September 2026
- Whalesbook, “Imarticus Learning IPO: Edtech’s Outcome Focus Faces Valuation Test”, April 2025
- YourStory, “After a turbulent year, edtech players to navigate a hybrid 2023”, December 2022
- Revelio Labs, Imarticus Learning employee count data, accessed September 2026
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