BYJU’s is India’s largest education company and the creator of the nation’s largest learning app. It offers vastly adaptive, appealing, and operative learning programs for students in classes 4 to 12 and other competitive exams as well. BYJU’s has become the most valuable start-up in India after raising about $350 million. Now it has some new investments from USB Group and Zoom founder Eric Yuan, Blackstone, and others, that valued the Bangalore-based firm at $16.5 billion.
BYJU’s has revealed that numbers of investors including Abu Dhabi government fund ADQ and Phoenix Rising had together invested about $350 million in the start-up. The latest valuation supports BYJU’s exceed Paytm, which was last valued at $16 billion, for the crown position in the Indian start-up field. Paytm is shortly operating on examining the public markets and aiming to build as much as $3 billion and eyeing a valuation of up to $30 billion.
Founded in 2011 as Think and Learn Pvt Ltd with the plan to facilitate online lessons to students, in 2015 the company launched an app, ‘BYJU’s - The Learning App’, which crossed over 4.7 million paid subscribers that are students who pay around $179 a year for accessing maths and science tutorials as well as game-based practice tests. The new investments are part of a larger round that BYJU’s kickstarted earlier this year and is looking to secure over $1.5 billion. Some of its recent investors also include B Capital Group and hedge fund XN. It was also valued at $11 billion late last year, and $5.57 billion in July 2019. The start-up plans to utilize the fresh capital, in part, to obtain more start-ups. BYJU’s which acquired Indian physical coaching institute Aakash for nearly $1 billion earlier this year, is carrying due diligence to buy and online learning start-up Toppr and has similarly engaged with US-based Epic, TechCrunch reported earlier this year.
BYJU’s provides students attempting undergraduate and graduate-level courses, and in recent years, it has likewise extended its program to serve all school-going students. The tutors on BYJU’s app tackle complex topics applying real-life objects. And presently the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted India to enforce a months-long nationwide lockdown and closed schools, stimulated the app’s growth, and those of several other online learning start-ups including Unacademy and Vedantu. BYJU’s produced revenue of over $100 million in the US, last year, Deborah Quazzo, managing partner of GSV Ventures, which has backed the BYJU’s said at a session in March held by Indian venture fund Blume Ventures.
As of 2019, this Indian company had secured nearly $785 million in funding from investors, including Sequoia Capital India, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Tencent, Sofina, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Brussels-based family office Verlinvest, development finance institution IFC, Napsters Ventures, CPPIB, and General Atlantic. It was also the first company in Asia to receive an investment from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.
In June 2020, the Edu-tech giant attained the decacorn status with an investment by Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital. In September 2020, BYJU’s replaced Oppo as the title sponsor of the Indian national cricket team. In March 2021, it secured $460 million in a Series F funding round. And in April 2021, B Capital, Baron Funds, and XN invested $1 billion in BYJU’s. Earlier this year, it announced that it has cumulated over 80 million users, 5.5 million of whom are paying subscribers. The current revenue of BYJU’s run rate is $800 million, a figure the company presumes will reach $1 billion in the next 12 to 15 months. In recent times, the company has also enhanced its international extension policies.
_______________________________________
Reference:
- www.economictimes.com
- www.moneycontrol.com