upGrad Acquires Soft Skills Training Startup Work Better To Strengthen Its B2B Offerings

EdTech unicorn, upGrad has acquired Mumbai-based enterprise training company Work Better for an undisclosed amount.

With this acquisition, Work Better founder Swapnil Kamat and the entire team will join upGrad For Business (a B2B arm), bringing its 300+ corporate clients and 250+ trainers to upGrad.

As a part of the deal, Work Better will merge into upGrad, and be renamed as upGrad Work Better, to offer tailor-made courses for employees and organizations.

Founded by 2018 by Swapnil Kamat, Work Better offers diverse solutions ranging from sales training programs, leadership development, customer services to business communication and professional effectiveness. The startup’s business quite hits it off with upGrad’s B2B arm, which offers outcome-based learning modules matching the organisation’s requirements.

Speaking about the acquisition, Founder of Work Better, Swapnil Kamat, said in a statement, “Work Better has deep-rooted expertise in soft skills, sales and behavior training. upGrad, on the other hand, is a leader in technical and hard skills training. With this consolidation, we both can leverage each other’s expertise to add further value and provide holistic solutions to customers.”

According to co-founder and Managing Director of upGrad, Mayank Kumar, the acquisition would facilitate his firm to achieve its goal of becoming one of the world’s leading integrated life-long-learning tech companies. This acquisition was finalized by upGrad for Business, the ed-tech firm’s business-to-business (B2B) division.

Founded by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar, Phalgun Kompalli, and Ravijot Chugh in 2015, upGrad offers higher education courses in collaboration with various universities. At present, the upskilling platform has partnered with over 300 universities with a user base of 2 million.

Minaxi Indra, President, upGrad For Business has said, “The rise of multifunctional roles which require new-age subject knowledge is constantly pushing medium and large-sized organizations to re-think their L&D strategies not just for skilling their talent pool but also for retaining them.”

Work Better’s acquisition comes a month after upGrad, in line with the M&A swell, acquired another B2B edtech platform Talentedge to cement its position in the higher education space.

Mumbai-based upGrad entered the unicorn club in August 2021, after raising a total of $185 million from Temasek, International Finance Corporation. upGrad had acquired Impartus, a video-based learning platform for INR 150 crore, in a cash and stocks deal in May last year. In 2020, upGrad acquired recruitment and staffing solutions company Rekrut India and Bengaluru-based coaching institute The Gate Academy (TGA).

Since its inception, the EdTech major has been 100% owned, funded, and run by its co-founders and a capital-efficient business.

About the Author

Author: Shalini Pathak

Shalini Pathak is a Staff Writer at EdTechReview (ETR) – India’s leading edtech media & community. She has over four years of experience in media, covering different beats. Like all writers she’s an enthusiastic reader first with a passion to create out of the box content, and an ability to write about any topic. As a part of the ETR team, she will cover the latest in the edtech industry with a focus on edtech startup stories and their funding.

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