Upskilling platform Scaler has launched a subscription-based upskilling programme aimed at recreating a college campus-like experience for tech professionals. The company claims to have grown 5-times compared to the previous financial year and has now set aside over $20 million for upcoming acquisitions.
Scaler has recently acquired online learning platform Coding Elements and is in talks to close another acquisition in a few weeks.
Talking about Forever, Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-founder, Scaler and InterviewBit, said that it has the potential to become a $50-100 million Accounting Rate of Return (ARR) product for the company.
“With technology changing dynamically and many skills becoming redundant, tech professionals must upskill themselves regularly to stay relevant in the industry and progress in their careers. Further, it’s not just the skillset alone but mentoring and networking that equally matters in advancing one’s career as one climbs up the ladder. Considering all this, we have designed a rigorous community-focussed learning programme,” he added.
Memberships
For the first few months, Forever membership will be invite-only post which members will be able to refer and invite their network or friends. The company will also onboard a curated set of mentors to help people find appropriate mentors for their career goals. The typical persona of a mentor on the platform would be product managers, senior software engineer, engineering team lead etc.
“There are two parts to a community — chattiness and knowledge-building. Chattiness is what’s happening in cyrpto, NFT; people would want to talk about these things in groups. Knowledge-building is when a company-founder or VP hosts a talk about their learnings in a small group,” said Arnav Gupta, Product and Strategy Lead, Scaler.
Like any community platform, one of the major challenges for Forever would be to keep the members engaged and constantly enable quality discussions.
Scaler has 8,000 active learners on its platform, while the parent company InterviewBit has over 2 million registered users. Scaler and InterviewBit are projected to close this fiscal year with $40 million ARR and the company is cashflow positive. The company also plans to expand into global markets by early 2022.
Launched in 2019, Scaler is an upskilling platform for college students and tech professionals. Students enrolled in Scaler are mentored and taught by tech leaders and subject matter experts working with organisations such as Google, Facebook, Intuit, Microsoft, Amazon, Hotstar, Snapdeal etc. Scaler learners see an average of 4.5x RoI (return on investment) from the course. The company is backed by marquee investors like Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global.