Ashwin Damera completed his MBA from Harvard in 2005. At this point, he likely had a range of rewarding options before him, including corporate gigs. He, however, made the trickier choice — starting up.

Damera’s first venture was a travel company, but the question of why quality higher education is expensive and out of reach for most always weighed on his mind. In 2010, he, along with Chaitanya Kalipatnapu, began building a tech platform where students and professionals could discover and enrol in executive-education courses from the world’s best universities and business schools. 

The result was Eruditus Learning Solutions, which became a unicorn last year. “We wanted to make high-quality education acceptable and affordable to people across the globe,” Damera, who serves as the CEO, told The CapTable.