When Mudit Goel traveled from New Delhi to New York for college, he didn’t know a career in education and entrepreneurship was in his future. But his activities as a college student provided a clue.
As a computer science student at Binghamton University, Mudit Goel started a coding club with some classmates. The members of the informal club worked through programming challenges together and practiced interview questions for their internships and budding careers, according to a profile on SUNY Binghamton’s alumni website.
After graduating in 2012, Goel went to work as a software developer for LinkedIn and Intuit. But before long, he realized teaching computer science skills was his passion. Goel took a product management role at a company in Ontario, where he worked on an adaptive learning data science platform, and after about a year, he knew he wanted to return to his home in India. There, he saw a need for people to learn the same technology skills that U.S. students were learning.
He founded Coding Elements in 2017 to offer courses on full-stack web development, mobile app development, data science and machine learning. His content targeted college-age students without computer science experience. His business launched with three classrooms (in person, not online) and had only three students in its first class, BWDisrupt reported.
Within two years, Coding Elements was so popular that it started building online courses to accommodate its large number of students, many of whom were traveling to New Delhi to attend class for two or three months at a time. The first online course, for the programming language Python, went Iive in late 2019.
That timing was key for Coding Elements’ sustainability through COVID-19. By the time the pandemic halted in-person classes in March of 2020, Coding Elements had launched four online courses.
“We started promoting those courses and experimenting with teaching coding to younger students via Zoom,” he said in the Binghamton alumni profile. More than half those signups were from outside India. High online ratings and impressive job and university placements for alumni helped attract students.
The company, which was bootstrapped, then began to seek partners to reach more students. When Goel proposed an idea to a public policy think tank for India’s government to offer free coding classes to young students, he learned the government was already interested in providing coding education. Coding Elements went on to train 1,000 teachers at various schools so they could in turn teach thousands of students using the Coding Elements platform.
How Coding Elements Sold to Scaler Academy
As Coding Elements continued to grow, it drew the attention of Scaler, an edtech platform for adults that launched in 2019 and brought on capital venture funding to acquire similar concepts.
Scaler Academy acquired Coding Elements in an all-cash deal worth about $1 million (about 8 crore) in August 2021 after a month of negotiation, according to TechiAI. It was Scaler’s first acquisition, and the company has gone on to buy a few other tech education platforms since.
At the time of the sale, Coding Elements had about 4,000 students on its online platform.
As part of the deal, Goel joined Scaler as strategy and product lead for data science and machine learning. In 2022, he moved into the role of senior vice president and business head for Scaler. Goel did not respond to an interview request for this story.
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