Course Hero Hires Tech Entrepreneur, Ankur Varma, as Chief Product Officer

Course Hero, an online learning platform that empowers millions of students and educators to succeed, announced today the appointment of Ankur Varma as its Chief Product Officer. With a deep background in search, artificial intelligence and audio-visual technologies, Varma will lead Course Hero’s product strategy to ideate and realize new ways to facilitate learning and knowledge sharing.

“With its extensive repository of learning resources and community of millions of students and educators, Course Hero’s already made tremendous progress to connect people from around the world to learn from one another,” said Varma. “There’s tremendous potential for how we can leverage Course Hero’s platform and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to create even more resources that promote deeper learning.”

Varma most recently served as CEO and founder of Plonked, a search engine for indexing and analyzing businesses, which was acquired by Spend Labs. Previously, he led the product, UX and design teams at Prism Labs and the software management team at Silver Spring Networks. Varma began his career on the engineering team at Microsoft where he drove audio and video (AV) architecture and development activities for Xbox360. He then joined Microsoft’s Xbox Incubation team working on rapid prototyping and proposals for launching new businesses.

“Ankur’s search and machine learning expertise are especially valuable as Course Hero ramps up the product pipeline with features that integrate AI technology and dynamic content with our massive online library of study resources,” said Andrew Grauer, founder and CEO of Course Hero. “In addition to his vast technical expertise, Ankur’s a proven leader with creative ideas for how Course Hero can continue to facilitate the exchange of knowledge for students and educators around the world.”

Varma holds three patents based on AV and data architecture technologies he developed, and has held advisor roles at Spend and Bold Financial Technologies. He earned a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University California, Berkeley.

Course Hero has created a crowd-sourced online library of over 18 million educational resources tailored specifically to courses at over 11,000 colleges and high schools. Its community of over 20 million students and educators come to Course Hero to find and share knowledge and study resources, contributing to its huge, ever-growing library.