GUVI

GUVI (an acronym for Grab Your Vernacular Imprint) is an IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad incubated company based in Chennai, India. It was founded by ex-PayPal engineers Arun Prakash, Sridevi Arun Prakash, and SP Balamurugan in 2014. GUVI offers free and paid learning courses on various IT and tech domains in Indian vernacular languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, and English.
GUVI's mission is "to make technical education available to all in their native languages". In 2022, Indian Information Technology and Consulting Service giant HCL acquired a majority stake in the vernacular edtech company that provides diverse professional and certificate tech courses to students, graduates, and working professionals who wish to upskill themselves.
History
The founder trio comprising Arun Prakash, Sridevi Arun Prakash, and SP Balamurugan, started GUVI as a volunteering initiative in the form of a YouTube channel back in 2011 while they were working for PayPal. They used to post videos, tutorials, and practice material explaining technical terminologies and concepts in vernacular languages like Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi. The founders’ primary goal was to bring tech closer to the learners not fluent in English.
It all started when GUVI’s CEO and founder, Arun Prakash went to attend an alumni meet at his college where he got the chance to meet and interact with the current batch of students. During the interaction, the students seemed to lack basic technical knowledge. So, Arun started teaching and explaining those tech concepts in the student’s native language. They seemed to grasp the concepts and understand them very well.
This made Arun realize the gaping skill gap in college students because of the high dependency on English for tech education. He then discussed his concern with Sridevi and Balamurugan. Then they decided to put out and teach technical skills to students in vernacular language to bridge the gap in tech education caused by the language barrier.
Arun started to upload his videos in vernacular language explaining tech concepts. Initially, the response was low and it didn’t get enough attention. Still, they stayed put and kept creating more videos. Soon, after almost 6 months from inception, they were able to gain a stable audience through their unique approach to spreading tech knowledge. They started receiving good engagement from various tier-2 and tier-3 learners as well as international viewers. With time, their YouTube channel had already garnered millions of views and 5000+ subscribers.
Given the demand and growing popularity, GUVI was finally started as a private limited company as GUVI Geeks Network Private Limited. Sridevi quit her job followed by S.P. Balamurugan to start working full time for GUVI. Meanwhile, Arun Prakash continued working at PayPal to support GUVI and fund its expenses. He too eventually quit his job in 2015 and came to work for GUVI full-time. After a while, given the potential, the company was then incubated by IIT-Madras at IIT-Madras Research Park in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. In 2019, GUVI got co-incubated by CIIE of IIM Ahmedabad too.
Further Developments
Once the company was in place, product development and content-building processes were put in motion. By 2015, revenue started flowing in as a result of GUVI’s earnest efforts through B2B marketing and outreach campaigns to attract more learners. GUVI had onboarded its first 1,000 learners by the end of 2015. The platform completed its first 1 million learners in 2018. Today, the number of learners has crossed 2 million on the platform.
Over the course of time, GUVI has managed to partner with various government agencies and tech institutions to further expand the acknowledgment and quality of their tech courses to help students, working professionals, and other stakeholders benefit from the highly recognized certification for the courses. In 2021, GUVI achieved the Standard of Quality & Security with ISO Certification.
Funding and Financials
Seeded with an initial capital of ₹10 lakhs, the start-up was incubated at the Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) based out of IIT Madras. The start-up then raised seed funding of ₹5 Lakh. GUVI was also rewarded with ₹50 lakh investment when it got co-incubated by CIIE IIM Ahmedabad.
GUVI received its first institutional round of funding of ₹1 Crore from US-based Gray Matters Capital's edLABS in April 2019. It then raised ₹6 Crore in its pre-series round A of funding from Education Catalyst Fund, an education-focused venture capital fund managed by CBA Capital, in April 2020.
GUVI also received funding from the JioGenNext accelerator program in 2018. It was also selected for Google Developer’s Launchpad Build initiative and received further funding through the same.
It also received equity free seed funding from EMPOWER Accelerating Women Entrepreneurship in 2019. Indian IT and consulting multinational company HCL Technologies acquired a majority stake in GUVI for an undisclosed amount.
Key Products and Services
GUVI primarily offers online paid and unpaid certification courses in various technology and computer programming fields such as web development, data analytics, data science, data engineering, cybersecurity, software automation and testing, software development, UI/UX design, etc.
Additionally, the platform also offers beginner and advanced-level, self-paced upskilling courses in vernacular languages to help learners learn about key programming languages, software, and development tools.
GUVI has various products and services that serve various target audiences such as kids, corporate, early professionals, fresh graduates, and people looking to switch careers.
Zen Class: Through Zen Class offers professional tech courses with certification and 100% placement support. The course includes practical experience paired with Live classes conducted by expert mentors with supreme expertise in their respective fields. The course duration is usually between three and nine months. Learners can also opt to learn in their native language.
GUVI Courses: GUVI courses offer free and paid self paced online courses with recorded videos to teach the fundamentals of various programming languages, software, frameworks, and other tech domain subjects. The courses are available in vernacular languages.
HackerKID: HackerKID aims to help young kids learn coding through a gamified platform. They also offer online coding classes for kids. The games help kids with concepts of web development, Python programming, syntax, algorithm building, etc.
GUVI for Corporates: GUVI for corporates provides corporate solutions and services in the field of tech hiring, corporate training, and candidate evaluation platform HYRE to assess technical skills in a prospective candidate.
Placement Preparation: Placement Preparation is a specialized platform to help college students prepare for competitive rounds and aptitude examinations that take place during the placements.
The company also offers GUVI IDE and gamified practice platforms like Webkata, Codekata, etc. to enable learners to write, execute and evaluate their coding proficiency.
Accreditations and Partnerships
GUVI Collaborated with AICTE in January 2022 to launch a widespread upskilling initiative to provide free Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Python courses online. GUVI was chosen among the Top 10 companies that got licenses from Elon Musk's OpenAI.
GUVI became an Accredited Partner of ‘Google for Education’ program in March 2022, which aimed to help widen the scope of tier I and tier II city learners by helping them learn technology in vernacular languages.
Back in August 2022, GUVI got qualitatively selected among the Edtech companies to offer courses in association with Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation (TNSDC) as part of the "Naan Mudhalvan" Initiative. The following month, HCL partnered with GUVI by becoming a majority stakeholder to drive the “Upskill Billions Worldwide” mission.
In the same month, GUVI’s HackerKid got associated with Schoolnet India Ltd to impart quality coding skills to young kids worldwide, through the online medium. By the end of the year, GUVI had become an official AWS training partner in India.
In 2023, GUVI also roped in IIT-Ropar as the official research partner for its Zen Class professional programs. Recently, GUVI further went on to partner with NSDC to make the vernacular e-learning platform available throughout India.
Presently, GUVI has also become an authorized Autodesk learning partner for some of its Zen courses. It has also partnered with IIT-M Pravartak to enable its learners to help upskill in tech domains. Additionally, the ed-tech platform has also been accredited by UiPath, NASSCOM, and Google Cloud to provide globally accepted certifications and quality tech courses.
Awards and Achievements
GUVI became the winner at Chennai Crowd Product Pitch in 2015. Back in 2017, GUVI was among the 11 women entrepreneurs-lead startups selected by Google Launchpad Build. GUVI then won the Equity Free Seed Fund Awarded at EMPOWER- Accelerating Women Entrepreneurship event in 2019.
GUVI created a Guinness World Record for achieving the feat of ‘Most users taking an online computer programming lesson in 24 hours’ through their AI-for-India 1.0 initiative. The event was organized between 24-25 April 2021 in association with AICTE and saw more than 5 lakh participants, 50 times more than the previous record.
GUVI was also recognized amongst the 100 Most Promising Edtechs Companies in South Asia by HolonIQ in 2021. GUVI was also the winner of ‘Action for India Silicon Valley Challenge’.
In 2022, Zee Digital awarded GUVI as the ‘Most Trusted Vernacular Edutech Brand’. It was also selected among the top EdTech companies by TNSDC ((Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation) under the ‘Naan Mudhalvan’ initiative.
In 2023, GUVI was recognized as the best Online Personalized Learning Platform through Education Innovative Awards by Entrepreneur India.
Notable Initiatives
During the early days, GUVI collaborated with Anna University to provide upskilling tech courses through the QEEE project which was successfully executed across 150 Engineering colleges across the country.
In 2018, GUVI conducted Asia’s 2nd largest AI Hackathon ‘Code In India’ in HCL Madurai with 500+ participants.
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020, GUVI offered free online coding courses across India.
GUVI also conducted the All India Robotic Process Automation Skillathon, with UiPath, in June 2020, to provide students an opportunity to get exposure to robotic process automation. The event included over 400 colleges across India and over 60,000 participants.
GUVI organized the AI for India 1.0 event through which the platform also created a Guinness Book of World Records as more than 1.12 lakh people got certified in AI.
GUVI later launched NEAT 3.0 in collaboration with AICTE under which it distributed 1 million free Python and AI courses from GUVI to disadvantaged students to help them learn tech.
In 2021, GUVI started an initiative where it provided free employability skilling to 5,000 students from economically weaker sections.
In March 2023, GUVI launched the AI for Women initiative on the occasion of International Women’s Week which lead to empowering more than 30,000 women with AI skills after learning from GUVI.
In addition to these, GUVI keeps holding various Hackathons and upskilling events across the country at regular intervals.
References
External links
Computer programming
Indian educational websites