Smriti DixitThe major player in the Ed-tech industry Byju’s is in the news due to the massive funding it is expected to generate in the near future. The sources claim that the raise could be somewhere around $600-700 million. The insights of the story can be taken by looking into the article details.
BYJU’S BACKGROUND
The company was launched in an application format in the year 2015 by Byju Raveendran. They are the country’s largest ed-tech company offering learning programs for schools as well the major competitive exams. The general courses offered are :
- Courses for classes 1-12
- JEE/NEET
- IAS
- CAT
- UPSC
The app has close to more than 75 million downloads across more than 1700 cities with an average time of 71 minutes daily. The company claims to have more than 5 million users in a month. It is also the second most valuable start up of the country.
The company is backed up by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, Tiger Global Management and Bond capital. The major focus of the company is to offer personalized learning where the students can learn & engage in complete clarity regarding what they want to study. They try to offer a great world class experience by making this phase of learning more engaging & efficient through the application of technology.
FUNDING DETAILS
The company is found to be in touch with new & existing investors for generating funds. The amount can be between $ 600-700 million and will bring a major change in the valuation of company by helping it to get to the position of $ 15 billion valuation. The year 2021 marked this as the first financing round. In 2020; the raise was close to $ 1 billion.
FUNDING USAGE
The sources specify that the funds will be use to buy the company that has a chain of offline test coaching services across the nation; Aakash Educational Services. The company is more than 33-year older company. It offers services for major exams, KVPY, NTSE, Olympiads and other exams. There are more than 200 Akash centres that cater to more than 2.5 Lakh students. It has been among the top 25 coaching institute across the nation especially for medical & IIT-JEE.
The expected acquisition can be of $ 1 billion. It would be the third prominent acquisition that the company is all ready to make in the last two years.
2019; Osmo for $120 million
2020; White Hat Jr that offers online coding classes.
Pandemic brought the biggest challenge in the area of education but what shined brightly as diamond was the ed-tech sector as it rose to close to $1.96 billion. They emerged as a solution admist the darkness of challenges. This now is the market that has the biggest competition in the present. They all are there to serve with their unique capabilities & strengths.
Vedantu, Unacademy, Gradeup and the list is unending but one name that has been the initiator is BYju’s. This decision to acquire Aakash itself speaks its volume.
It’s not a small brand; this acquisition will make it clear that Byju’s is here to stay and create tough spot for everyone. Its portfolio is all strategically created to become the market leader.