Online ed-tech start-up Byju’s has raised ₹2,100 crore from internet giant Naspers and Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board, making it the highest funded start-up in the education sector.
Out of this, Naspers has pumped in ₹1,236 crore and CPP Investment Board ₹886 crore, according to paper.vc, a data intelligence platform.
With this fund raise, Byju’s has mopped up in excess of $258 million from a clutch of investors, including Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Tencent, Sequoia Capital, Sofina, Verlinvest, IFC and Aarin Capital.
This fund raise comes almost a year and half after Byju’s raised around $40 million from Tencent Holdings.
Course design
The start-up, founded by Byju Raveendran in 2008, uses a mix of physical classrooms and an app, through which it coaches K-12 students and for competitive exams such as JEE, NEET, CAT, IAS, GRE and GMAT. The course material — designed in-house by a team of teachers and technologists numbering around 450 — uses games and videos to coach students. Byju’s has 22 million registered users and 1.4 million annual paid subscribers and on an average a student spends 57 minutes per day on the app, according to company executives.
India has the largest K-12 education system in the world, with over 260 million enrolments, and is estimated to grow 30 per cent by 2022, according to industry estimates.
Domestic & overseas buys
Byju’s hopes to replicate its India success story in markets abroad. The company has been following a mix of organic growth and acquisitions. Last year, it acquired TutorVista and Edurite from Pearson for an undisclosed sum. TutorVista is into online tutoring, catering to school and college students in the US and gets “millions” of visitors every month, according to company executives.
Recently, Byju’s acquired Bengaluru-based math learning start-up Math Adventures.
Byju’s has seen more than 100 per cent growth, with revenue going up from ₹115 crore in 2015-16 to ₹260 crore in 2016-17. Also, the company claims to have turned profitable last quarter.
For Naspers, the latest to invest in Byju’s, the first half of this year has been positive. Its results for the half-year to September 2018, have seen revenues go up by 29 per cent to $11 billion, driven by e-commerce ventures and its stake in Tencent.