Udacity, a pioneer in online education has announced the appointment of Ishan Gupta as the managing director for India.

A successful entrepreneur, Ishan Gupta has played a formidable role in edutech in India, having built EduKart in 2011, a leading education marketplace for India. He most recently served as the vice president (Business) at Paytm, the leading Indian mobile commerce platform.

Earlier in March 2016, the team at EduKart was acqui-hired by Paytm.

According to his Linkedin profile, Gupta’s mission is to bring accessible, affordable, engaging, and highly effective higher education to the world. He is also set to democratize education in India. Before that he spearheaded Paytm’s business by building an extensive and sustainable third party service providers’ eco-system.

Clarissa Shen, vice president, Udacity International said,

Ishan brings valuable experience as a leader through his work at startups and large companies. More importantly, he shares our mission and values in how we wish to better serve students and industry alike in India".

With his expert skills he fabricated EduKart as India’s leading education marketplace, offering education seekers a platform to choose and enroll from 2000+ courses in degree, diploma, certificate, entrance coaching and K12 categories.

Excited with his appointment at Udacity, Gupta commented,

My stint as an entrepreneur at EduKart built my understanding of the education sector, while my role at Paytm provided me insights into building a technology-led business at massive scale. Now, at Udacity India, I am excited to apply all these learnings to build a strong team and launch more India-focused courses”.

With an MBA from Stanford University and an engineering degree from the University of Delhi, Gupta has also worked with One97 and Facebook.

Udacity has operations across China, Germany, India, Brazil and the UK and is backed by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann and others. It provides online education to students in collaboration with employers including Google, Facebook, AT&T, IBM Watson, Amazon Alexa, MercedesBenz, Didi Chuxing and Flipkart.