The 2010-founded startup, where Blackstone owns a majority stake since 2021, announced new senior management appointments in January with Mark Moran as chief marketing officer and Veerasundar V as chief financial officer.
The Bengaluru- and San Francisco-headquartered company offers digital skilling programmes for professionals, enabling learners to upskill and get certified in fast-growing digital domains.
The new set of changes, put in motion mid-2023, has helped the company turn Ebitda-level profitable since December 2023, a stage it was once operating at until Blackstone entered its cap table, founder and chief executive Krishna Kumar told ET in an interaction. The metric – earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation – measures core operating profitability excluding financing, taxes, and non-cash expenses.
“An internal goal is to get to at least 20% Ebitda levels in the next 18 months. With Blackstone sitting on our board, our board meetings and auditing committees already work like that of a public company. We just need better metrics to actually list. It will definitely happen within two years. Achieving Rs 100 crore Ebidta would be the right time,” Kumar said.
In the financial year ended March 2023, Simplilearn reported Rs 701 crore in total revenue, up from Rs 465 crore a year ago. Losses had widened by 36% to Rs 244 crore during the period. Overall marketing costs accounted for 32% of the total spends in FY23, at Rs 302 crore. In FY22, it formed a 50% chunk of total expenses, the company said.
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Declining to share FY24 figures, “right now, our goal is that even though we do not grow, we want to get to profitability,” Kumar added. The firm also raised $45 million in a fresh round of funding led by global edtech-focussed venture capital firm GSV Ventures.“There is so much opportunity to go deeper once we start narrowing our focus. In AI alone, we have courses in collaboration with IIT Kanpur, Caltech, MIT and Wharton. But what I don’t have yet are AI programmes in partnership with Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services or Snowflake platforms yet… We want to have stronger partnerships to become their preferred technology training partners,” Kumar said.
Experiments that Simplilearn has been cutting down on include servicing new consumer profiles such as first-time job seekers or those with over 15 years of experience, trying new markets beyond India and the US, and spending more than needed on marketing, Kumar said.
“The consumer profiles are very different. Our sweet spot for customers is 1 to 10 years’ experience… Traditionally too, most professionals do not go back to business school after 15 years,” he added.
The company had also experimented with a job guarantee programme in 2022 on its online offerings, but stopped the model in 2023. Before the job market correction of 2022, edtech firms such as Unacademy-owned Relevel, Masai School and Newton School popularised outcome-oriented businesses that significantly advertised job availability to market their upskilling courses in tech.