upGrad was started by Mayank Kumar and his two friends Ravijot Chugh & Phalgun Kompalli. They were later joined by serial entrepreneur Ronnie Screwala as the fourth co-founder.   Mayank got the idea for upGrad when he saw a major gap in India's education sector. Mayank discovered that brick & mortar higher education was reaching less than a quarter of TAM - that’s 150 million people that make up the total addressable market, who should be in college, but aren’t, and Mayank saw this as a massive opportunity.  Around the same time Ronnie Screwala, well known for building UTV and many other category-defining businesses, sold his controlling stake in UTV to Disney for a reported 2,000 crore rupees.  By January of 2015, Ronnie had officially joined Mayank, Phalgun, and Ravijot as a co-founder, and he also made a seed-stage investment of $16 million dollars into the company, which was at that time something that he had re-branded to UEducation.  The lack of offline market penetration was one gap that online education could fill, but another opportunity was the disconnect between traditional college curriculums and industry requirements and this what upGrad decided to solve.   Their first course was a 12-week rigorous online entrepreneurship program that taught students through live lectures, case studies, group assignments, and guidance. This first StartUp program was just a test, really. An MVP of sorts. It was taught mainly by UpGrad, along with a couple of people they’d brought in from successful startup companies, but this wasn’t going to be the long-term structure that these programs would take - UpGrad planned step back, out of the teaching role and into the administrative role, so that rather than becoming an OEM, an original education manufacturer like for example BYJU’S or Unacademy, they would instead tie up with IITs and global universities to create online-only courses specifically for UpGrad students.   By the end of 2018, using this innovative approach had taken UpGrad’s student base from 100 to upwards of 15,000. They’d tied up with multiple higher education institutions including the University of Cambridge, IMT Ghaziabad, BITS Pilani, IIIT-B, and MICA. They’d also started teaming up with recruiting partners to ensure that UpGrad graduates could get placements right out of their programs. By the end of 2020, UpGrad had crossed a million learners across 50+ countries, and delivered 10 million hours of learning experience to their students. They also raised their first external capital, which was $6.7 million dollars in debt funding from IIFL. They followed this round up with a $9.3 million dollar venture round from Ronnie’s Unilazer Ventures in April of 2021, and then $185 million dollars from Temasek, the World Bank’s IFC and IIFL in a round that closed in August of 2021. This last round of 2021 brought their valuation - which was unknown at the beginning of 2021 - to $1.2 billion dollars. In 2021, UpGrad tripled their course offerings, scaled university partnerships, closed 3 acquisitions. After raising $225 million in June of 2022, UpGrad opened up a number of offline experience centers across cities in India. In the first three months of 2022, they were profitable - their revenue had seen a 150% growth, reaching an ARR of $300 million, and this resulted in a 70% gross margin across all of their income streams, which allowed them to start thinking globally.   Today, UpGrad has a goal of $2 billion gross revenue by 2026, and while it’s unclear whether the profitability they saw in Q4 of the financial year of 2022 will continue into the financial year of 2023, sustainability is definitely one of UpGrad’s core company values, and that’s what it’s gonna take for Mayank, Phalgun, and Ronnie to achieve their goal of becoming one of top 3-5 companies globally in edtech.