Veranda acquires Chennai Race for online education; Transaction Valued at Rs. 100 Crores

Chennai: The Kalpathi Group owned, Veranda Learning Solutions today announced the acquisition of Chennai Race, India’s leading coaching institute for Banking, SSC, and PSC exams. The transaction, valued at over INR 100 crores that includes stock and earn out, now leads to the launch of a new brand, called Veranda Race. Veranda Race will initially offer result oriented online training programs for Banking, Staff Selection Commission and TNPSC. The focus of Veranda Race remains firmly on ensuring rigour and discipline amongst enrolled students thereby giving them the best opportunity to get jobs once they appear for written examinations. By December 2021 Veranda Race is planning to launch course content in 11 Indian languages.

During the financial year 2019-20, Chennai Race recorded sales of about INR 45 crores and has trained over 200,000 students so far backed across the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and Punjab. Beginning in Chennai, Race’s unique ‘6 level practice program’ which, helps students to improve their speed and accuracy in a short span of time, and their resulted oriented, strategic curriculum, developed for each type of competitive exams, has seen Chennai Race students filling up about 60 to 80 percent of Tamil Nadu’s vacancies in the past 4-5 years.

Suresh Kalpathi, CEO, Veranda Learning Solution said “In Race, we see an alignment with our philosophy of rigor and discipline in their education delivery, focus on outcomes and affordability to the real India. We expect Veranda Race to grow significantly in the coming months and years with addition of more products and languages. Race is a great brand to bring under our newly launched venture, as it opens new possibilities in the core areas of our business. The acquisition of Race will bolster our offerings and will further define our position in the sector”.

Talking at the launch of the program Bharath Seeman, Promotor of Chennai Race & Head of Veranda Race, said “the Veranda Race programs are set for rollout nationally, in the coming months, targeting a revenue of INR 50 crores in the first year. By the end of 2021, our content will be available in 11 Indian languages and we would be training around 50,000 to 60,000 students across the country. We have priced our courses around INR 7500/- which includes course materials and mentoring support”.

“This partnership is an important opportunity for Race as a brand to grow big and take our ‘real result-oriented coaching’ approach to every part of the country. We launched ‘RACE’ in Dec -2012 and created a unique curriculum with focus on helping our students to land PSC and Banking jobs. At Veranda RACE the key metric to assess our success will be ‘number of students getting jobs’, which is the main goal of this venture.” Bharath added.