upGrad doubles classes, courses and capacity to deal with the surge in demand for online learning

The Ed Tech major upGrad, India's largest higher education provider, just moved their start dates for all their 40 courses to start every month instead of quarterly to take on the surge in demand from working professionals.

This has more than doubled its course capacity, and each class now has a peak of 1000 learners at a given time.

"The larger the class in online, the more active the peer-to-peer learning and so it's the inverse of offline learning," says Ronnie Screwvala, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, upGrad. "Last month we reached 5, 00,000 learners for our online programs, which is no mean feat in itself. Now take into consideration that our average ARPU is INR 2.5 lakhs. Yet, we are only at the very start of addressing a market of over 100 million working professionals and graduates," continued Screwvala.

This quarter, upGrad's revenues will cross an annual run rate of INR 500 Crore with the launch of their Live Learning platform free of cost to multiple colleges and universities, to replicate their classrooms online and address their students during the COVID-19 period seamlessly.

The company also separately recorded 10,000 enrollments for their 350 hours of free courses initiated during this period.