Ashwin Damera

Bio

Ashwin Damera is the Co-Founder and CEO at Eruditus Executive Education, which provides global access to executive education programs. He was also the founder and CEO of Travelguru. Currently, he is an angel investor and advisor to multiple startups and entrepreneurs.

He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.

Startup Journey & Career Growth

Ashwin Damera started his career as a Portfolio Risk Manager at Citibank. After gaining experience there in multiple roles for about 5 years, he co-founded Travelguru in 2005, an Indian travel website for booking flights, hotels, and holiday packages. The company was later acquired by Travelocity in 2009.Later, he interned with Dave Barger, the current CEO of JetBlue Airways, in New York. 

Since then, he's worked on various projects in the higher education space. In 2011 he co-founded Eruditus Executive Education with Chaitanya Kalipatnapu. In his new role at Eruditus, he has made it a priority to focus on university outreach and academic collaborations. Additionally, he spearheads the institute’s strategy for global markets expansion by coordinating with other departments across industries in order to successfully achieve this goal.

Eruditus Journey

·      2010 - Launched as an offline service provider

·      2015 - Rolls out to offer online courses

·      2016 - Received Series A funding of $1.1 Million from Ved Capital.

·      2017 - Received Series B funding of $8 Million from Bertelsmann.

·      2019 - Nine universities partners across the world, received Series C funding of $42 Million from Sequoia Capital.

·      2020 - Starts scaling online boot camps and raised Series D funding of $133 Million from Chang-Zuckerberg Initiative and Prosus.

·      2021 - Forays into K-12 with the acquisition of iD Tech and launches Emeritus Insights for bite-sized learning.

Awards and Recognition

·      Received Best Education Start-up of the Year by Entrepreneur India.

·      Became the 23rd startup to join the unicorn club in 2021.

Podcast

Ashwin Damera, Co-founder of EdTech company Eruditus, speaks about the effect the ‘founder-startup fit’ has on scaling a company and the importance of a mentor with Anand Daniel, partner at Accel, in the INSIGHTS series podcast.

You can listen to the episode here - INSIGHTS #31 Ashwin Damera of Emeritus on why the founder-startup fit is vital | by Anand Daniel | Accel India Insights is now SeedToScale Insights | Medium

Quote

“Our story started as an Indian company classroom, but now, we are a global company online”

·      Ashwin Damera, Co-founder of Eruditus