Scaler gears up to accelerate business growth with key leadership appointments

Bengaluru: Scaler, a leading ed-tech start-up for upskilling students and working professionals, today announced five key leadership appointments towards further strengthening its Strategic, Marketing and Creative business units to accelerate business growth.

Rahul Karthikeyan joins as the Chief Marketing Officer, Arnav Gupta as Product and Strategy Lead, Anu Nair as Creative Head, Ranjeet Kumar, and Manmeet Singh Akali as Co-Heads of Brand & Content.

Elaborating on the growth hires, Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-founder, Scaler and InterviewBit, said, “Scaler has grown from strength to strength in the last two years. We have achieved several business milestones and built high-quality tech talent at par with some of the best national and international universities. As we prepare ourselves for the next phase of growth, industry knowledge and experience will be even more crucial across all aspects. I am, therefore, extremely delighted to have some of the brightest minds in the business join us as we journey to become a world-class virtual tech university. We continue to see a huge demand for our courses among students and working professionals. We also look to expand our presence beyond metros, and the plan is to hire over 100-150 people in the current fiscal across functions to support this expansion.”

Commenting on his appointment, Rahul Karthikeyan, who joins as the Chief Marketing Officer, said, “Our goal is to get brand awareness for Scaler and InterviewBit within the tech industry and drive in relevance and accessibility for students by way of upskilling, which ultimately promotes career growth. We are building a strong marketing team to contribute to business growth, backed by an excellent product. We want to build a quality education platform that is constantly upgrading based on trends in the market to ensure that our students are up to date. It is an exciting time for the brand, and I am happy to be part of this journey.”

Rahul is a seasoned marketing professional with over 15+ years of experience working for several illustrious brands and agencies. Most recently, Rahul was the Head of Marketing at Upgrad, where he led several critical brand-building initiatives across varied platforms.

Speaking on his new role, Arnav Gupta, Product and Strategy Lead, said, “Scaler is making strong strides in the ed-tech sector by enabling high-quality tech-education accessible to everyone and helping learners achieve career growth. Having co-founded a platform for software developers early in my career, I am acutely aware of the gap in the current education system and the industry’s requirements. I’m therefore very thrilled to join Scaler and be part of the ed-tech revolution once again”.

Arnav is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Coding Blocks in 2016, a learning platform for software developers and Greplr, a hyperlocal aggregator app that Micromax acquired. He has also worked with Zomato as their Engineering Head for Mobile Apps.

Ranjeet Kumar and Manmeet Singh Akali join as Co-Heads of Brand & Content. Ranjeet comes in with a decade of rich and extensive experience in marketing and advertising. He has worked with major advertising networks in the country – WPP, IPG, Publicis & Dentsu, winning over 21+ national and international awards for marketing campaigns for global fintech networks, automobile majors and durable consumer giants. Manmeet was an ed-tech entrepreneur himself. He founded a video mentoring platform, Klarity, in 2017 that later got acquired by Eduvanz. A software engineer by education, Manmeet comes with the right mix of eclectic experience across the technology, education and business sectors to help Scaler in their next phase of growth. Their immediate priorities are to build a strong team of creative marketing professionals. Additionally, over the next six months together, they will significantly scale up branding initiatives to drive awareness and trust in the tech community, focusing on the effective use of context, culture, community, and content.

Anu Nair will be the Creative Head and has over a decade of experience in different facets of advertising and Media Management. Having worked for brands across B2B and B2C sectors, Anu brings in rich creative expertise. In his new role at Scaler, Anu will be responsible for streamlining, strategising, developing, and executing creative communications for the brand, focusing on paid media.

Scaler has posted 200% revenue growth for FY 21 (2020-21) and increased its workforce by 3X during the year amidst the pandemic. Today, the start-up has 350+ employees and over 1000 technology professionals working as part-time career coaches, teaching assistants and mentors.

The pandemic has given the much-needed impetus to adopt digitisation in the education sector and provide universal access to quality education. With the rise in demand for talents skilled in new-age digital skills, both students and working professionals are now turning towards upskilling platforms to learn new skills and accelerate their career. Further, organisations are also partnering with ed-tech platforms to train their workforce with the latest digital technologies. According to the RedSeer and Omidyar Network India report, India’s ed-tech market will touch $3.5B by 2022.