76,000 paid customers in just 30 months

I had a chance to connect with Lovleen Bhatia of Edureka last month. His interview was published in the New Indian Express, dated 12th May 2014.

The Eureka Moment in Education

Lovleen Bhatia is one of the founders of Edureka, an instructor-led online platform for courses that caters to IT professionals who want to continuously upgrade their skills on new technologies. Started in 2011 with Kapil Tyagi, a former colleague from Infosys, Edureka offers programmes in Android, Big Data, Hadoop Administration, Apache Cassandra, Cloud Computing, Data Science and Business Analytics with R among others. Within 30 months, they have trained nearly 76,000 professionals and students from across India, US, UK, Australia and Europe, with live online and interactive sessions and 24X7 training support. Their Android program itself commands a 30,000 subscribers base.

Born in Bareilly, UP, Lovleen studied at the Bishop Conrad School, and later went to IIT-BHU for a BTech in Electrical Engineering. He started his career as a Software Engineer with Infosys, before moving to the Synopsys Worldwide Application team. He was then a Technical Leader at Texas Instruments (TI) for more than seven years, responsible for the development and deployment of design methodologies across Japan, France and US. He later led R&D at DbyDx Software, which got acquired by a listed company, before starting Edureka. Lovleen has authored over 20 technical papers in various international and TI conferences. As CEO of Edureka, Bhatia looks after Sales and Marketing.

Throughout his career, Lovleen was always prepared for challenges in the technology space and wanted to impart the knowledge to those who sought it. His extensive field research on the education system in India, identifying the problematic areas and solutions to address them, was presented as a paper in the International Conference of Education Research and Planning in Madrid, Spain, in 2011.

Edureka has tapped into the global market in online education for mid career professionals, where courses can be delivered at 10 to 15 per cent of the fees charged by foreign companies, without compromising on quality. One of the key growth factors is the e-learning initiative by companies globally, where good content and reliable delivery is important. The company is bootstrapped at the moment, without any external funding.

Lovleen has a passion for sports, technology and adventure road trips. He played lot of football in school and college days and follows the European leagues very closely. Barcelona is his favourite team and he likes players like Xavi, Iniesta and Messi. According to him, “Any sport helps us imbibe the sportsman spirit which is very important in life. There are times when we lose but we have to keep trying and go on. I am always up for challenges in life and have learnt to take things in the right spirit.” His family is his pillar of strength and unwinding with his family at the end of the day is his de-stress mantra.

Rohit is an entrepreneur in the elearning space and makes business simulation games that are used for assessments by colleges and recruitment / training by companies. He has been writing for The New Indian Express since 2011, mostly about entrepreneurship and education related stuff.

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