Scaler Academy - An Edtech to Learn Programming & Prepare for Interview
đź“„Company Profiles
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Scaler (by InterviewBit).
It is an undeniable fact that the Indian education system has undergone a radical change over the last few decades. While there have been concerted efforts at making education more accessible, what is still lacking, especially in higher education, is the much sought-after connection with the industry.
Instructors and mentors aside, who would not only equip pupils with new skills but also guide them in their careers, there is the necessity to have a curriculum that is vetted by industry veterans. That’s exactly what led to the launch of Scaler Academy in 2019.
An upskilling platform by InterviewBit, Scaler enables aspiring students and working professionals in tech to unlock their potential. At this moment, the platform has over 2200 students and working professionals enrolled in its program.
In terms of outcome, Scaler has already found resounding success. 95% of the placed learners have already bagged jobs with aspirational companies as software engineers and developers. More than 100 of them work with Amazon and 7+ students are aligned with Google. In terms of salaries, the average compensation stands at INR 18.77 lakh per annum while the highest salary offered to a Scaler learner was a whopping INR 1.5 crore per annum!
StartupTalky interviewed the founders of Scaler (by InterviewBit) to know about the Success Story of Scaler Academy and take a glance at Scaler's Products, Business Model, Funding, Growth & more.
Scaler - Company Highlights
| Company Name | Scaler |
|---|---|
| Founder | Anshuman Singh, Abhimanyu Saxena |
| Founded | 2015 (InterviewBit), 2019 (Scaler) |
| Sector | Edtech |
| Headquarter | Bangalore |
| Total Funding | $76.5 million+ (2022) |
| Valuation | $710 mn (2022) |
Scaler - About
Scaler - Founders and Team
Scaler - Startup Story | How it Started?
Scaler - Name, Tagline and Logo
Scaler - Business Model and Revenue Model
Scaler - Startup Launch
Scaler - Challenges Faced
Scaler - Growth and Revenue
Scaler - Funding and Investors
Scaler - Competitors
Scaler - Acquisitions
Scaler - Recognition and Achievements
Scaler - Future Plans
Scaler - Community and Reviews
Scaler - About
Scaler was incubated inside the InterviewBit in 2019 - a platform where people could learn new programming skills and practice interview questions in order to scale up in their careers.
Scaler is an upskilling platform by InterviewBit that enables both students and working professionals to unlock their talent. Scaler's offerings cater to -
- Tech-enthusiasts in university (Scaler Edge)
- Young working professionals (Scaler Academy)
- Those looking to transform into future CTOs and entrepreneurs (Scaler Plus)
Scaler's meticulously structured programs vary in duration from 6 months to 24 months. These act as career accelerators by enhancing the skills of the students by offering them a modern curriculum with satisfactory exposure to the latest technologies. Scaler's students have access to over 1000 working professionals from top software companies across the globe including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter among others who act as instructors, teaching assistants, mentors and career coaches.
Currently, Scaler has over 2200 students and working professionals enrolled in its program. The Scaler programs are being developed as an inclusive ecosystem of engineers and mentors to help talent scale and build the next generation of global tech leaders. Scaler has been designed to help and guide students from engineering colleges to prepare and learn skills that they would require for top technology jobs.
Scaler helps to polish skills and get its students ready for prospective jobs with big-tech companies, whether they are fresh college graduates or working professionals looking to advance in their careers.
Scaler's goal is to ensure that the talent is recognized regardless of the student’s background. The platform aims to create a benchmark for software engineers in the recruitment space so as to ensure that they receive the best opportunities in the industry to further their careers.
Himaya Presthitha
Scaler - Product/Services Offered
Scaler is a competitive online accelerator program that offers a course on computer science, which trains software developers to land jobs with top tech companies. It offers an intensive 6-12-month computer science course through live classes delivered by tech leaders and subject matter experts. The curriculum is systematically and specifically created in order to provide students with sufficient exposure to the latest technologies.
Here's a list of the Scaler's offerings -
Scaler Edge
For all the tech enthusiasts from the universities/colleges, Scaler Edge's curriculum will help one master any goal. Be it getting interview ready, being a top competitive programmer, learning skills to build a startup, or making a cutting-edge project to stand out from a group. Scaler Edge's modules are designed keeping in mind all the necessary skills & knowledge required to accomplish one's goal.
The learning is mainly divided into 3 parts -
- Module 1 - Career Essentials (Here, one can learn basic and advanced subject knowledge)
- Career Track - One has to choose a career track based on interest (Ex: Software development (AWS, Array etc), AI & ML (SQL Pro, NLP etc.,)
- Module 2 - Career Capstone project (Learners will be given a hands-on project to work on. Ex: Build a Zomato-like-app)
Scaler Academy
For all the tech professionals who want to accelerate their careers, Scaler Academy has designed a flexible program for you. It is a program to master Problem Solving & System Design. One can choose the curriculum based on the level of knowledge one already entails & the type of specialization needed i.e., Backend Specialization or Full-Stack Specialization.
Scaler Academy's curriculum includes -
- Thoughtfully designed learning aspects, topics & concepts
- Hands-on Projects and assignments to implement concepts
- Personalized topics, peers & pace of learning are optimized for one's needs
- Industry-tested curriculum to make one job/career ready
Scaler Data Science
Scaler brings an exclusive data science and machine learning program for the students, which provides:
- Live class
- Industry projects
- 1:1 mentorship
- Secure Placement Assistance
Scaler Topics
Scaler Topics consist of:
- Courses
- Contests
- Articles
- Reading Tracks
Scaler Plus
If one is looking to transform into future CTOs and entrepreneurs, then Scaler Academy Plus is the recommended coursework. Whether one wants to want to be a software architect (Frontend /Backend), engineering manager, or senior software engineer, the Scaler Plus curriculum is designed by top industry leaders.
"At Scaler, we largely focus our efforts towards improving and fine-tuning the coding proficiency of software developers thereby helping them bridge the gap between student abilities and industry expectations" Says the Scaler Team
Scaler - Founders and Team
Both Scaler and InterviewBit have been founded by IIIT (International Institute of Information Technology) Hyderabad alums Anshuman Singh and Abhimanyu Saxena.
Anshuman Singh
Anshuman previously worked at Facebook, where he led the team to build and scale the Messenger feature. Anshuman was also part of the four-member landing team to set up the London office of Facebook. He is a competitive programmer and a two-time ACM ICPC World Finalist.
Abhimanyu Saxena
Abhimanyu led a team that designed NYC-based retail marketplace Fab.com’s entire front end. A seasoned entrepreneur, Abhimanyu co-founded his first enterprise while still in college.
Very recently, serial entrepreneur Naren Krishna has joined as the business unit head of Careers at Scaler.
Overall, Scaler has a team of 800+ employees, and 1000+ technology professionals, who work with the platform part-time. These people primarily work as teaching assistants, mentors, career coaches, and more.
Rishabh Rathi
Scaler - Startup Story | How it Started?
Abhimanyu Saxena started his career with Progress Software as a Programmer and later moved to Fab.com as a Software Architect, where he worked for over three years. During his days at Fab.com, he had to recruit new talent for projects, which turned out to be a tedious job. Even after screening hundreds of resumes and conducting interviews, they were only able to find the right talent in single digits.
Almost 90% of the candidates interviewed did not have the necessary tech skills that were required for the job. This was when he experienced the scarcity of skilled tech talent in the industry and realized the gap that exists between the university curriculum and the skills that are required to succeed as a software engineer. The other co-founder Anshuman Singh, who was one of the early tech leaders at Facebook, had also faced the same challenge while recruiting talent for Facebook’s rapidly growing tech team.
In 2015, together, they started InterviewBit as an online platform providing interview prep to aspirants to make them job-ready, thereby also addressing the challenge faced by recruiters in hiring the right talent for the job.
The majority of the private organizations, both large and small, claim that while graduates might possess theoretical knowledge, they usually lack skills that are required to complement entry-level jobs. They realized that most people they engaged with are capable of achieving even greater things given the right guidance. That’s exactly what led to the launch of Scaler Academy in 2019.
At Scaler, the pedagogy of the courses has been created and the structured interaction with recruiters and industry leaders (CXOs) has been set up, as it helps understand what companies are looking for in candidates, and then train our students with those skillsets accordingly.
Ashwini
Scaler - Name, Tagline and Logo
Scaler means scale - scale your career, scale your skills, scale your life to be bigger, and better. It’s also a play on a mathematical term - Scalar.
The logo shows the process of scaling, from the small cube, becoming bigger, to the white space resembling a diagonal arrow pointing upscaling.
The colour blue was chosen, as it’s commonly associated with trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, and intelligence. These are the qualities that Scaler wants to inspire in others when looking at the brand.
Scaler - Business Model and Revenue Model
InterviewBit.com is a free coding practice platform for developers. The platform helps college students as well as working professionals to polish their programming skills and get job-ready. The companies that hire from the programmer community on InterviewBit.com pay the company hiring fee. All Scaler by InterviewBit courses has prepaid Scaler course fees that students need to pay to be part of the program.
PV Vyshnavi
Scaler - Startup Launch
Scaler's first two paying customers were Amazon and Facebook.
"We started helping Amazon hire quality engineers back in 2015, and till date are super proud that we’ve helped Amazon hire a lot of top tech stars. We built an interview warm up tool for Facebook Careers called CodeLab, which was exceptionally popular amongst the FB applicants" Says Scaler Founders.
Scaler - Challenges Faced
Fixing the problem of talent scarcity is a rather hard problem with fixes needed both on the supply and demand side. Lack of awareness among students and archaic ways of hiring at businesses, which have gotten established over years are two problems that need behaviour change. However, Scaler does see a positive change coming on both fronts at a rapid pace.
Rishabh Rathi
Scaler - Growth and Revenue
The year 2020 has been a phenomenal one for India’s Edtech sector, with online learning gaining unprecedented prominence and validation. Likewise, it has been an eventful year for Scaler too. Here are some growth highlights that Scaler has witnessed to date:
- Scaler witnessed a 100% rise in inquiries for upskilling courses on its platform from both students and working professionals
- It has been an operationally profitable entity since the launch of InterviewBit way back in 2015.
- Scaler's revenue grew by 2X as compared to Q1 of FY 2019-20 amid the current pandemic.
- Scaler has crossed its business benchmark for the year in customer acquisition and revenue well before the estimated timeline and is confident of closing this financial year with 4X growth.
- Scaler has expanded its operations to the US in January 2022
- Scaler's placement numbers have been phenomenal too.
- Scaler proudly presents that they have noticed a 250% increase in the salaries of its learners.
- Scaler's courses offer 4.5X RoI (return on investment) for the students
- Scaler also boasts of the fact that the over 380 Scaler alumni are placed in companies like Microsoft, Google, Uber, Amazon, Paypal, Adobe, VMWare, Intuit and Mcafee.
- The cumulative annual salary of the Scaler graduates is currently more than Rs 600 crore.
Scalerverse
Scaler launched Scalerverse on May 18, 2022, which is aimed to serve as a one-of-a-kind community living space for trainees, mentors, and teachers. Scalerverse is currently operational in 2 centres in Bengaluru and is expected to grow to 5 cities by the end of 2022.
“We are excited to curate a first-of-its-kind learning community within the Scaler ecosystem. The dedicated space will help our trainees, teachers and mentors come together to build a strong and cohesive network that starts with learning and remains a support system for the rest of their professional careers. It is a whole new concept of enriching our community with guidance and inspiration from peers for their holistic growth and development. This will also assist the learners and employees from various cities to collaborate and create a safe space for themselves in a new city,” said Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-Founder, Scaler and Interviewbit, on the launch of Scalerverse.
Scaler Financials
| Scaler Financials | FY22 | FY23 |
|---|---|---|
| Operating Revenue | Rs 65 crore | Rs 317 crore |
| Total Expenses | Rs 340 crore | Rs 655 crore |
| Profit/Loss | Loss of Rs 174 | Loss of Rs 330 crore |
Expenses
Scaler total expenses rises from Rs 340 crore in FY22 to Rs 655 crore in FY23.
EBITDA
| Scaler FY22-FY23 | FY22 | FY23 |
|---|---|---|
| EBITDA Margin | -256% | -96.9% |
| Expense/â‚ą of Op Revenue | Rs 3.69 | Rs 2.07 |
| ROCE | -791% | N/A |
Ashwini
Scaler - Funding and Investors
Scaler (by InterviewBit) has raised a total of over $76.5 million in funding to date. The recent round of funding came in from Lightrock, Sequoia, and Tiger Global, which helped the company raise $55 mn, as of 1st February 2022.
Scaler's Funding and Investors details are as follows:
| Date | Series | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 1, 2022 | Series B | $55 million | Lightrock India, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global |
| January 28, 2020 | Series A | $20 Million | Sequoia India, Tiger Global, Global Founders Capital and Rocket Internet |
| - | - | $1.5 Million | Sequoia Surge Program |
Scaler is backed by marquee investors like Sequoia India, Tiger Global, Global Founders Capital, and Rocket Internet along with several high-profile individual investors. Lightrock India has stepped in as a new investor leading the recent round of Scaler on February 1, 2022, where the company raised $55 mn.
Scaler Shareholding
A majority of Scaler shares are held by Anshuman Singh and Abhimanyu Saxena, who holds 29.05% of the shares of the company. Sequoia is the next in line in terms of shareholding, which possesses the lion's share of Scaler shares among the investors with 22.52% of the company's stocks.
Scaler - Competitors
Some of the top competitors of Scaler Academy include -
- LIDO
- CampK12
- Masai School
- Upgrad
- Simplilearn
- Great Learning
- Coding Ninjas
- Avalon
Chayanika Goswami
Scaler - Acquisitions
Scaler Academy has acquired Coding Minutes, an online learning platform from Delhi, India for an all-cash deal worth $1 million on October 21, 2021. This is the second acquisition of the company after it acquired Coding Elements in August 2021. Scaler Academy Cofounder Abhimanyu Saxena hinted that there will be some more acquisitions for Scaler Academy this year for which the company has kept around $20 million aside. Speaking on this, Saxena also highlighted the flagship product of the company, InterviewBit.
Scaler Academy recently acquired Applied Roots on March 2, 2022, in a deal worth $50 mn. As part of the deal, all of the 6 co-founders of Applied Roots will be joining Scaler after the acquisition.
Here's a glimpse into the 3 acquisitions that Scaler made so far:
| Name of the company acquired | Date of acquisition | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Applied Roots | March 2, 2022 | $50 mn |
| Coding Minutes | October 21, 2021 | $98.82 mn |
| Coding Elements | August 30, 2021 | $1.05 mn |
Scaler - Recognition and Achievements
- InterviewBit was recognized by LinkedIn as one of the 25 hottest Indian start-ups to work for in 2019
- InterviewBit was one among the 17 startups from India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Bangladesh that have made it to the inaugural cohort of venture capital firm Sequoia’s Surge program
Scaler - Future Plans
This year, Scaler's plan is to make a significant investment in onboarding talent to strengthen its core team even more. As a learner-centric platform, its primary focus is to revise and improve the course curriculum on an ongoing basis to ensure it is in sync with industry requirements and demand.
"At Scaler, we believe execution is equally essential for success in online learning. Towards this end, we continuously experiment with and incorporate new methodologies for teaching and learning to ensure an effective outcome" added Scaler team
Scaler is planning to strengthen its leadership and product ecosystem. It is also looking at Industry-Academia partnerships to provide access to skill-based professional courses to students, especially in Tier 2 & 3 cities, and create industry-ready tech talent. Besides, the team is focusing on making Scaler the preferred destination to recruit top engineering talent. Ultimately, their goal is to bridge the demand-supply gap in the tech industry.
Scaler - Community and Reviews
Scaler is a learning platform for all coders and tech enthusiasts. Scaler's community on discord currently comprises around 21179 members.
Daily Problem Solving is one of the initiatives by Scaler for its budding community of coders on Discord. Scaler understands that coding every day can be challenging but it is an integral part of becoming better. In the same vein, it has introduced - the 'Daily Challenge'. Where one can compete with fellow coders from within the community and have a sense of belonging while fighting for Scaler Tokens. Apart from this, people can join the Scaler Discord community to get regular updates on Internships & Full-time opportunities at InterviewBit/Scaler.
The reviews of Scaler Academy by many people say...
- "People teaching you are either a world-class competitive programmer or have cracked interviews in companies which take world-class hard interviews"
- "The doubt support time is mentioned as 30 minutes but it is wrong, I must say. It’s lesser than that. Anytime I feel doubt, I just message my community of batch mates or even to the teacher who taught me that concept and they clarify instantly"
"You will have a Student Success Manager, who will be guiding you through every step of your journey. In my case, My SSM even got to the extent that , I was not solving problems in the mid of the course so she contacted me and asked me to make a google doc and share with her and update daily on that doc the questions i do"
- " You succeed in a job interview -: they will call and congrats and talk about next opportunities. If, You failed in one -: they will call and will say it’s normal and will discuss areas of improvement you can have"
FAQs
How are InterviewBit and Scaler related?
Scaler was incubated inside the InterviewBit in 2019 - a platform where people could learn new programming skills and practice interview questions in order to scale up in their careers.
What is Scaler?
Scaler is a competitive online accelerator program that offers a course on computer science that trains software developers to land jobs with top tech companies. It offers an intensive 6-12-month computer science course.
How much is Scaler Funding?
Scaler (by InterviewBit) has raised a total of $76.5 million in investment to date.
Who are the founders of Scaler?
Scaler and InterviewBit both are founded by IIIT Hyderabad alums Anshuman Singh and Abhimanyu Saxena.
What is Scaler Academy?
Scaler Academy is an online tech-versity for the top 1% of software developers in the country. We offer an intensive six-month computer science course through live classes delivered by tech leaders and subject matter experts.
Who does Scaler Cater to?
Scaler caters to:
- Tech-enthusiasts in university (Scaler Edge)
- Young working professionals (Scaler Academy)
- Those looking to transform into future CTOs and entrepreneurs (Scaler Plus)
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