Hero Vired: Hero Group partners with MIT, Cambridge for edtech company

Hero group which is known mainly for its scooter and motorcycle manufacturing Hero Motocorp Ltd. unit. But now it's recently in news for getting into the edtech industry as well by launching its new Platform Hero Vired. The platform is headed by its founder and CEO. Akshay Munjal. The initial investment of 10 million $ came from the Hero family itself. The platform provides students with interactive support with peer to peer communication, and engagement based online instructor-led interactive classes.

It has partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and New York based Codecademy, an e-learning based coding company and it is expected to launch a mix of courses for both professionals and higher education aspirants. This is not the first time Hero group has ventured into the education industry; it joined the industry in 1964 and launched BML Munjal University in 2014.

“We have got a very large young population, which is definitely looking for jobs, currently either unemployed or not meaningfully employed. On the other hand, we have an industry that is starved for talent. What we are attempting to do is how do we solve this problem from where it originates from," Munjal told PTI in an interview.

When asked about investments in the new venture, he said, "the family has already committed upwards of USD 10 million only on this venture, which is a substantial sum. That gives us the flexibility of building focus on quality."

Hero Vired targets three segments of students firstly the students who just completed their XII and are looking for quality education, secondly the College graduated who are looking for meaningful jobs but are unable to get that and thirdly for working professionals with 0-10 years of experience who want to learn skills and upskill themselves.

It is said to provide two programmes- one with 6 months of the full-time program along with three to four months of internship and the other a part-time course of 11 months with classes on weekends. The fee ranges from Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh depending on the programme," Munjal said with the first batch expected to begin soon and the others followed by 100 students each batch.

Initially, the edtech will offer online learning facilities but after everything normalizes it would provide a hybrid option, adding select programs will offer an academic bank of credits as proposed in the National Education Policy for learners to access future learning added Munjal.