<p><em><strong>More than $100 million will flow into the industry through acquisitions and investments, writes Vishal Krishna</strong></em></p><p>Over 6 lakh engineers pass out of colleges in India every year. Additionally, professional colleges churn out 5 million graduates every year as well. According to MeritTrac, a meagre 15 per cent of them are employable. To increase the number of employable people in the country, several certification courses have cropped up. NIIT and Aptech were the pioneers of certification courses for almost two decades. Of late, many entrepreneurs have taken a bet on training this generation on to a new set of skills. Simplilearn, Jigsaw Academy, Edutor and Edureka have been fighting it out to win students and universities, too. These companies combined can also raise more than $100 million in 18 months.</p><p>For universities, the main challenge in training people is huge. These startups are aiding employability in the country. In fast-changing world, students have to be certified in technologies such as big data engineering, computer languages like Python, PHP and Hadoop distributed computing architecture. Some of these courses are heavy terms and can leave any graduate with an uneasy feeling about moving ahead in their career. These days the sartups play a vital role in shaping the future of the country. </p><p>According to the National Skill Development Corporation, the firms are not only betting on the valuations, but also betting on 300 million young people who are actively seeking jobs by 2030. To boot LinkedIn acquired online skill development firm Lynda in the US for $1.5 billion. Now Lynda — in its LinkedIn avatar—will look at startups that have built efficiencies and scale in education.</p><p>“Education and professional skilling is a big bet if these companies use technology to make learning easier,” says Sanjeev Agarwal, co-founder of Helion Ventures.</p><p>Helion’s first bet was on Simplilearn where it jointly with Mayfield and Kalaari Capital invested $28 million. In the six years, Simplilearn has scaled up to 400,000 customers in 150 countries. It offers more than 250 courses with an option of either taking it in a classroom or online module.<br><br>“India needs certification and vocational training courses. There is a big opportunity to expand these courses globally too,” says Krishna Kumar, founder of Simplilearn.<br><br>Recently, Simplilearn acquired a marketing training company called Market Motive in the US for $10 million. This will give the company a firm foothold in the US.</p><p>To add to the opportunities in India and the US, there is a shortage of 200,000 data scientists by 2015. Gartner — the research firm—predicts that there will be a ten fold growth for training data scientists in five years.<br><br>Two profitable startups, Edureka (an annualized revenue of Rs.30 crore) and Jigsaw Academy (an annualized revenue of Rs 12 crore.) have hit big by training data scientists. Their students are sought after in analytics firms such as Fractal Analytics, MuSigma and TEG Analytics.<br><br>Similarly, Wipro and Infosys, which have been adding analytics teams, are working with these two startups to train their employees. Edureka and Jigsaw are in advanced talks with investors to raise more than Rs 20 crore.<br><br>"Our scalable platform works with more than 1,000 curated teachers and over 1000 courses," says Lovleen Bhatia, co-founder of Edureka.</p><p>The Bangalore-based Manipal Group of Institutions is known to swoop in on these profitable companies to scale up their data training courses.</p><p>"We have been training engineers to use data creatively and intelligently," says Gaurav Vohra, CEO of Jigsaw Academy. They have plans to hit revenues of $50 million in eighteen months.<br><br>Jigsaw is founded by Sarita Digumarti and Gaurav Vohra, both data scientists in the US-based firm before founding the company in 2012 in Bangalore.</p><p>There are some betting on schools, too. Edutor Technologies is betting on building interactive technologies that aid in education. They have raised Rs 2 crore from Hyderabad Angels and will raise more when their tablet based application is adopted by over 50000 schools in India. It currently has more than 40000 paying students. The company is betting on self learning through tablets.<br><br>Other startups focused on building school based practice tests and learning are Embibe, Nayi Disha and Purple Stream have raised money to focus entirely on schools.</p><p>BW | Businessworld predicts that global funds will focus on education technology and we can witness small acquisitions in 12 months. However, there has not been a big acquisition since 2011, in education tech. The last one was Pearson bought online tuition firm TutorVista for Rs 700 crore. Prepare for big monies coming into the sector to make many more Indians employable.</p>
