Ruangguru Co-founder, CEO Wins Harvard Kennedy’s 2020 Digital Innovation Alumni Award
Ruangguru Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Belva Devara won the 2020 Harvard Kennedy School Alumni Awards in Digital Innovation. According to the HKS statement, Devara received this award due to his success in defining a problem and creating its sustainable and scalable solution through technology, by co-founding and leading Ruangguru to become Southeast Asia’s largest education technology company.
According to the awards page, the Harvard Kennedy School Alumni Board “honors several outstanding alumni for their exceptional public service and significant contributions to the Kennedy School and to local, national, and global communities.”
Other HKS Alumni Awards 2020 recipients are J. Mark Iwry (USA), Sara Minkara (American-Lebanese), Theodora Skeadas (USA), Jerome Holmes (USA), Women in Defense, Diplomacy, and Development (W3D) Shared Interest Group (USA), and The Honorable Jerome A. Holmes (USA).
“It is such an honor that my alma mater has honored me this award,” Devara said. “This is a form of appreciation and reminder for me and the entire Ruangguru family to continue innovating and committing to our vision, which is to expand access to quality education with technology. This award is for all Ruangguru teams. “
Belva founded Ruangguru with his best friend, Iman Usman, in 2014, when he was still pursuing a master’s degree in Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School, Boston, United States. During his studies, Belva learned that the quality of education can change a child’s future. That motivated Belva and Iman‘s vision to create a technology that can provide a learning alternative where students can simultaneously access high-quality educational content. Now, the Ruangguru mobile application has broadened access to a more affordable and efficient high-qualty educational material compared to conventional learning methods.
In its sixth year, Ruangguru is known as the education technology company that has made learning easier for 17 million students and provide access to 300,000 teachers, and operates actively in Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand.
