How slow-but-steady Eruditus won Chan Zuckerberg fund's attention

In 2009, after selling his first start-up Travelguru to Travelocity, Ashwin Damera took a year’s break to think what he could do next. “I wanted to work in a field which had a high impact on peoples’ lives. For this, I was closely looking at health tech and edtech,” says Damera, a Harvard Business School alumnus.

Soon, he met Chaitanya Kalipatnapu who had just returned to India after leading executive education programmes at INSEAD and was looking to start an edtech venture. With common goals in mind, both joined hands to bring quality education to people and Eruditus was born in 2010.

The company, however, had a slow start. From 2010 to 2015, it could only raise $7 million. “We