KnowledgeHut buy to help upGrad overseas

The acquisition will also allow upGrad to double down its presence and offerings for the international geographies of North America, West Asia and Southeast Asia. At present, these markets contribute to 65% of KnowledgeHut’s overall revenues.

The majority of courses on upGrad range between six and 24 months. The KnowledgeHut acquisition will allow upGrad to now offer 10- to 100 days long refresher courses to its more than 1 million registered user base.

The edtech platform has been aggressively focusing on its international foray into Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam in Southeast Asia, as well as the UK, West Asia, North Africa and the US, this year. It expects 40% of its revenues to come from international markets over the next two years, the company told Mint earlier.

The current acquisition is part of upGrad’s $250 million corpus, which it recently earmarked for acquisitions to drive its inorganic international growth over the next 7-9 months. The KnowledgeHut deal is estimated to be about $35 million, said persons in the industry who are aware of the development.

KnowledgeHut will continue to work independently as a wholly-owned subsidiary of upGrad, with founder Subramanyam Reddy serving as its chief executive officer (CEO) .

KnowledgeHut helps corporates upskill their employees and provides 200 professional certification courses on its platform across 10 segments of web development, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science, cybersecurity, and cloud computing. upGrad plans to scale course offerings on KnowledgeHut’s platform to 400 in the coming year.

“We felt that there were a lot of synergies between KnowledgeHut and upGrad, during our diligence process. Apart from the international revenues, we get to push more offerings to global markets through this acquisition. Further, customers coming on KnowledgeHut for refresher courses can later move to the upGrad for more in-depth learning. In the next 18 months, we look to scale KnowledgeHut to overtake competitors like Simplilearn by revenues,” said upGrad co-founder and chairperson, Ronnie Screwvala in an interaction with Mint.