The IIT-M & IIM-A incubated EdTech company - GUVI(Grab Ur Vernacular Imprint) is India’s first vernacular EdTech platform accelerating in the E-learning industry by providing comfortable IT upskilling & virtual tech training services to more than 1.9 Million learners globally. Recently, GUVI was awarded the title - 'Best Online Personalized Learning Platform’ (Education Innovative awards) by Entrepreneur India.
Since its inception in 2014, GUVI has been playing a key role in the digital era by persistently upgrading the skill profiles of young tech aspirants, early professionals, college students & other job seekers in the IT & Software industry.
Let’s have a brief discussion with Mr Arun Prakash, Founder & CEO of GUVI, to detail GUVI’s journey ahead with an inspiring vision & mission.
How do you feel about winning this award from ‘Entrepreneur India’?
Arun Prakash: It is indeed a proud moment of recognition that acknowledges the quality of upskilling through our virtual platform. Our team shares the joy of imparting skills to every nook & corner with hassle-free online courses available in native languages that cover even rural & remote areas.
What is all about the vernacular approach in courses & upskilling in GUVI?
Arun Prakash: More than 300 self-paced tech courses are instructed in Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu & more such native languages other than just English, breaking the language barriers in learning skills. GUVI is all about delivering highly effective online learning experiences to its users. Alongside, a power move for tech job aspirants is offered through our Zen class career programs that provide professional career guidance & placement support through 600+ top companies as hiring partners.
What are the other initiatives or plans of GUVI that benefit the learners?
Arun Prakash: GUVI team always encourages the progressive thoughts of Ms. Sridevi Arunprakash, & one such thought is“ Now is never too late to Upgrade”. GUVI team is all set to launch an empowering initiative, named the SriGeek initiative, to greatly mobilize women with tech skills.
About 8 grand virtual & IRL events are being launched under this SriGeek initiative from February 2023 to March 2023. Among these the most prominent events include AI-for-women, Tech-talks with women CEOs & CTOs, Empowering skill resources for economically challenged women, & #sheisback program for women to return back to the workforce after a career break.
How do you think AI-for-women will be a successful initiative?
Arun Prakash: The motivation to launch ‘AI-for-women’ comes from its successful precedent - ‘AI-for-India’. The success story is written by humongous responses from numerous aspirants from remote areas/villages that found tech-skills accessible & at the same time ‘understandable’. Their active participation in the ‘AI-for-India’ has made GUVI create the Guinness World Record for the 'Most number of users to take a programming lesson in 24 Hours,' by beating the previous record by 50 times. Likewise, we aim to recreate the success through ‘AI-for-Women’.
What is the impact that you wish to make in the future with GUVI?
Arun Prakash: GUVI has been taking the lead in the EdTech space, upskilling millions of learners worldwide by upholding the idea that language and authenticity should never be a barrier to quality education. Our team constantly strives to make impactful progress among learners by launching the latest tech courses in many more native languages across 150+ countries across the globe. Furthermore, progress around the world is seen through generating awareness of skill proficiency & tech talent over monotonous educational degrees.
What are your thoughts on expanding the scope of GUVI?
Arun Prakash: Being a prestigious part of HCL Group, GUVI shares brand partnerships & collaboration with eminent partners like ‘Google for Education’, AICTE, AWS, and Google cloud. We are also offering courses & career programs that are accredited by renowned institutions like IIT Madras, UiPath & NASSCOM. These collaborations have largely democratized the learning experiences to the career aspiring learners online.
The online bootcamps of Zen class provide skill specialization in various trending domains like Full-stack Web Development, Data Science, Machine Learning, Automation Testing, & DevOps. We have focused on getting close to the career dreams of other creative aspirants & launched UI/UX, Digital Marketing, Business Analytics & other development courses. Soon, we’d rise to cover all the tech domains that cover 1.2 million job opportunities in 2023.
