Alison, a free online learning platform, has acquired Dash Beyond, an Indian EdTech company that offers an interactive career encyclopedia, the Ireland-based company has announced recently.
While the company did not disclose the terms of the deal, it said “the intended plan for the merger is to utilize Dash Beyond’s career encyclopedia as a tool for recommending courses to learners who are pursuing a particular career.” As such, it added, the acquisition will greatly enhance its capacity to help learners identify the courses they need to succeed on their chosen career paths.
Dash Beyond is a Hyderabad-based EdTech company that aids young adults and people in achieving their desired career by helping them make informed education and career decisions. Through its interactive career encyclopedia, Dash Beyond uses educational cinema and gamified career exploration to help people make better choices about their future education and careers. The career encyclopedia can be explored through three unique interfaces: one each for schools, parents and students or those re-entering the job market.
Once users have chosen a career they wish to pursue, the “Dash Beyond Maps” feature recommends to users which school subjects, online courses and skills they should prioritize to achieve their desired career. Dash Beyond also showcases available career opportunities.
Commenting on the acquisition, Mike Feerick, Alison’s CEO and Founder, stated, as shared by the company in a blog post,
“By leveraging Dash Beyond’s expertise in gamified learning, career information and research, Alison can offer even more to our millions of learners worldwide. Combined with our free learning, publishing, and career-focused psychometric offerings for both B2C and B2B, Dash Beyond will help Alison to achieve our ambition of building the world’s leading end-to-end empowerment platform, accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time, for free in any language.”
Aakaanksh Pothukutchi, Dash Beyond’s CEO, also issued a statement in the same blog post,
“Because we share in Alison’s mission to make free education accessible to everyone, regardless of their economic background and educational level, the decision to become part of a platform that reaches more than 19 million people across the globe came easy. We are delighted to join Alison, and to have this unique opportunity to use gamified learning, psychometrics, skills-based assessments and job matching algorithms to enable anyone, anywhere to uplift and empower themselves by pursuing their education and career dreams.”
Alison said both the company and Dash Beyond are excited by the acquisition, as they share a vision and a means of achieving it. Like Alison, Dash Beyond is also free to use, with revenue being generated through advertising and premium services.
As part of the acquisition, Aakaanksh Pothukutchi and the rest of the Dash Beyond team will join Alison’s global team. Alison is based in Galway, Ireland. It offers over 2500 free learning courses and claims to have 19 million learners on its platform.
