When education startup Udacity, headquartered in Silicon Valley, decided to expand its operations, it chose India first.
It’s been 10 months now that the startup began its operations in Bengaluru, and now it is witnessing a surge, in terms of number of students enrolling in various courses, including its popular Nanodegree programmes.
Udacity, which joined the Unicorn club last year, works with industry leaders including AT&T, Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and Cloudera to build technology classes and help students in advancing their career.
Udacity Vice President (International) and Managing Director (Asia) Clarissa Shen, who was in Bengaluru recently, told DH that India is a very important market for the company. “India is No 3 in terms of developers, and it would surpass both the US and China by 2018,” she said.
While at present, it operates in a co-working space with eight people, it is hopeful to move to its own space soon. “As our Indian market grows, our team size will also increase. Of our 170 single courses and Nanodegree programmes, given the huge mobile market, Android development is quite popular here, as nearly 27,000 students are undergoing the programme,” she said, adding that on a monthly basis, they are seeing over 12,000 Nanodegree students globally, and over 500 students from India. “It costs Rs 9,800 a month, and in some cases, companies reimburse the amount for employees. We are in talks with some universities here, so that we could reach out to more students,” Shen said, adding that in the last year, they saw 1.70 lakh students enrolling in various courses or programmes in India.
Talking about new courses, Shen said that Udacity is constantly developing new courses, and hinted that the next may be in the Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) space, as they are trending now.