Scaler, the Bengaluru-headquartered ed-tech startup that offers upskilling courses to working professionals across India recently announced that it raised $55 million in a new financing round. With its eyes set on expanding to international as it looks to expand to international markets including the U.S, the funding would enable the startup to widen its reach and offerings. 

Led by new investor Lightrock India along with two existing investors, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global, the funding helps the total capital raised by the startup since January 2020 to reach over $76.5 million. With this influx of capital, the startup stands poised to diversify its offerings, hire more qualified people, and expand to different business verticals. Sharing her confidence in the ed-tech startup Divya Venkatavaraghavan, Principal Investor, Lightrock India, said, "The team at Scaler Academy (& InterviewBit) are transforming higher education in India by democratizing the privilege of working in technology for millions of Indians. They are building a learning community that is accountable for outcomes and designed for the future of work.”

Starting off as InterviewBit, an ed-tech company aimed at helping students crack interviews, the birth of Scaler was the result of market demand for in-depth learning on subjects across the technological fields like AI/ML and data science. Speaking to TechCrunch, on the impetus behind creating Scaler in parallel to InterviewBit Abhimanyu Saxena, co-founder of Scaler said that “for people deprived of the high-learning ecosystem, it is very hard for them to make a massive learning delta by just consuming content.” And thus Scaler was created with a vision of providing working professionals a means to upskill and grow. Welcoming the new round of funding, Abhinayu explains that “technologies like machine learning and data science will create a new kind of India powered by communication technologies like 5G that will have a far-reaching impact on the country's socio-economic status. We are creating the skilling ecosystem that will ensure that we succeed by creating a future-ready India."

The startup today offers multiple courses in topic areas like data science and machine learning. To make them market-relevant, these curriculums are designed in consultation with major tech employers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft. 

To meet the growing demand for tech talent in India, this proves to be a crucial step. With ed-tech companies like Scaler provide the support needed by the evergrowing Indian IT sectors– which reached the size of $200 billion by recent estimates– in bridging the gap between the supply and demand of tech talent.  “The failure of legacy institutions in India’s higher education sector, particularly in the IT space, has opened up opportunities for avowed status-quo disruptors like Scaler to push a new kind of thinking that looks beyond cost arbitrage-based success,” said Abhimanyu Saxena in a recent press release.