Singapore-based edtech company Emeritus Institute of Management raised $40 million in a series C round of funding. The company partners with U.S. and European universities to provide online courses to working professionals globally and has offices in Boston, Dubai, Mexico City, Mumbai, New Delhi and Singapore.
The round was led by Sequoia India, and existing investor Bertelsmann India Investments also participated.
Emeritus' Boston office employs 35 people and it's where the company develops the curriculum. Founded in 2015, the startup is vying for a significant slice of the $280 billion pie that is the global professional education market.
It partners with top U.S. schools including Columbia Business School, Tuck Executive Education at Dartmouth and MIT Management Executive Education, offering courses in finance, marketing, leadership, analytics and digital innovation. The courses offered are a combination of lectures from university faculty, experiential learning through simulations, role-plays and group projects. In 2019, the startup said it will enroll 30,000 students from across more than 80 countries.
The proceeds from the round will be used to create a more immersive and adaptive learning platform and expand the multilingual capabilities of courses.
"Emeritus provides a 360-degree solution to our partner universities to help them take their courses online and to reach global audiences. Seventy percent of our students are based outside of the United States, and this fundraise will help accelerate our mission of making high-quality professional education more accessible and affordable," said Ashwin Damera, co-founder and Director at Emeritus, in a statement.
Emeritus was founded as the online learning division of Singapore-based Eruditus Executive Education, which offers executive education programs to corporations and professionals. Founded by Ashwin Damera and Chaitanya Kalipatnapu in 2010, Eruditus offers courses that typically last for 6-8 months and use a mix of on-campus and off-campus classes from business schools worldwide including INSEAD, Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley Haas and Columbia Business School.
