More and more professionals are ditching the traditional MBA and turning to platforms like GreyCampus, one of the fastest-growing providers of online certification courses, to stay relevant
Former Goldman Sachs and Citibank executive Vijay Pasupulati, founder of GreyCampus
Image: Harsha Vadlamani for Forbes India
Neena Kaur Suras, a project manager at Tech Mahindra for nearly four years, wanted to specialise in her area of work “so that my customers across the world know that I can take care of my core area”.
But quitting her job for an MBA didn’t seem worthwhile for the 37-year-old, who already had managerial experience. So Suras turned to GreyCampus, a four-year-old online certification provider, for Prince2, a programme in project management. “This programme made more sense than an MBA. I was already a manager; this would add more value to my current line of work,” says Suras.
GreyCampus is a Hyderabad-based startup that provides online training for professional certification courses across areas such as project management, complex data, service management and quality management. It develops the contents and modules which are then empanelled with global certifying agencies that issue the professional certificates. Founded by former Goldman Sachs and Citibank executive Vijay Pasupulati, the company has been listed by consultancy firm Deloitte among India’s fastest-growing tech companies for the past four years.
In 2016, GreyCampus was India’s fastest growing tech company with an average revenue growth of over 1,622 percent between 2013 and 2016. In 2017, it stood at the 13th position with an average revenue growth of 228 percent between 2014 and 2017. (The Deloitte rankings require the companies to have operating revenue in excess of $50,000.)
“Education is a $300 billion industry and we believe there is a significant gap in the levels of current and required competency. That’s what we are trying to address through GreyCampus,” Pasupulati tells Forbes India. “The current higher education delivery that is done through a one-time, two-year course like a typical MBA may not be the dominant mode in the years to come. I see higher education evolving into a career education solution where programmes would be flexible, continuous and lifelong.”
For Pasupulati, who grew up in a quintessential middle-class family, entrepreneurship wasn’t the first option. His father worked with Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, while his mother was the vice principal of a school. A good student, Pasupulati secured admissions to the prestigious National Institute of Technology in Telangana’s Warangal to pursue his studies in computer science.
After graduating in 1996, he went on to work with the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT outsourcing firm, and was posted in Singapore as a program developer. A few years later, he moved to Citibank and then to New York to work for the Zurich-based Credit Suisse. While in New York, he also pursued a part-time MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
His big break came in early-2005 when he was hired by Goldman Sachs and was sent, along with nine others, to set up the trading floor in Mumbai. When he started to hire a team, the lack of a modern curriculum in the business schools came to the fore. “While colleges had a fantastic curriculum, many of them weren’t updated and hadn’t kept up with the growing needs of employers. That’s when we felt that we could fill the gap,” says Pasupulati.
In 2008, Pasupulati quit Goldman Sachs and, along with his friend and tech entrepreneur Sarath Sura, set up WinZest, a finishing school for engineering graduates, in Hyderabad. A few years later, the company also ventured into the higher education sector where it began training engineering students through online content. The business was doing well and Pasupulati reckons that 30,000-odd students were using the services. But a lack of enthusiasm from engineering colleges meant he couldn’t scale up the business the way he wanted to.
In 2013, WinZest changed its business model, raised an undisclosed amount of money from a few Hyderabad-based angel investors and tied up with some of the world’s best certification agencies to offer online training programmes. The company also renamed itself GreyCampus.
GreyCampus was India’s fastest growing tech company in 2016 and stood at the 13th place in 2017
(This story appears in the 19 January, 2018 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)