Working on Gen AI tool to make video learning content more accessible, affordable: Upsurge

Mumbai: Upsurge, an e-learning platform that focuses on stock market trading and investing, aspires to become the leading platform in the domain of finance and is working on a generative AI tool to churn out video-based content to make its offerings more accessible and affordable, say its co-founders Kunal Shah and Mahip Gupta.

The focus right now is on Indian markets but the company eventually plans to go global to tap into the growing financial markets overseas, according to Kunal Shah.

Shah and Gupta along with Pratik Bajaj co-founded Valuationary in 2020, which was acquired by Raise Financial Services in 2022 and rechristened Upsurge.

With more people keen to dabble in stock market investment, the demand for learning stock market trading and investing is on a constant rise, said Gupta.

"At Upsurge, we feel stock market participants shall learn about how to trade and invest in the markets thoroughly so that they make fewer mistakes while they are trading or investing," Gupta told PTI.

The wide range of courses on offer today cater to both beginners stepping into the stock market and experienced traders and investors looking to enhance their skills, Shah added. The name Upsurge resonates better with the younger trading and investing audience, he said.

“Upsurge is working on a generative AI tool to produce video-based learning content that will make its product more accessible and affordable,” Shah told PTI.

"The idea behind creating Upsurge is to ensure that stock market participants trade and invest right, especially in the Futures and Options (F&O) segment, where 90 per cent of traders do not make money. Upsurge imparts education through well-produced courses, live sessions, mentorship programmes, and social media initiatives," he explained.

With over 60 courses and more than five mentorship programmes (revolving around options trading, technical analysis, investing strategy and personal finance among others) in its arsenal, the platform has garnered more than 100,000 users who are constantly learning on their platform and becoming better traders and investors, Shah noted.

Upsurge has been using multiple services from AWS (Amazon Web Services) since its inception to ensure traffic management, as the platform builds up and scales.

Over 50 traders, investors and fund managers teach on Upsurge’s platform. The overall community size is over half a million learners across Upsurge platforms.

"Life has changed quite drastically for the founders and the entire team post the acquisition," said Shah. The speed of lining up courses and product offerings is lightning fast.

"While maintaining the speed, we are also ensuring that the value we provide to our users is much higher than the price that we charge. This is also the reason why Upsurge is one of the most affordable platforms to learn trading and investing across India," he said.

The vision for Upsurge is to become the number one learning platform in the domain of finance.

"Going forward, we will be gamifying the entire learning process to make it more interactive and engaging. This shall help Upsurge to increase its completion rates (people enrolling & completing the course), which are currently at about 25 per cent," he says.

Upsurge has leveraged AWS services - Amazon's cloud computing unit - extensively in scaling its business.

"We have been using multiple services from AWS since the inception of our business like EC2 for autoscaling our servers to ensure we manage our traffic well. Along with that, we have been using Cloud Front, Elemental MediaConvert, and S3 to ensure that our content storage, video processing, and content streaming work seamlessly," Gupta said.

Amazon’s SES (Simple Email Service) has helped Upsurge to automate high-volume emails, leading to 10 percent of free users getting converted into paid users.

"We are a big beneficiary of AWS services," Gupta said, exuding confidence that the partnership with AWS will play an instrumental role in helping upsurge scale its business.

(This story has been produced by PTI in collaboration with Amazon Web Services).