Bengaluru, January 9, 2020

Bengaluru headquartered Edtech start-up Byju’s, which turned profitable in fiscal year 2019, has raised $200 million from New York headquartered investment firm Tiger Global Management at a valuation of $8 billion.

With this latest round, Byju's has raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding over 13 rounds, per data from Crunchbase. The unicorn start-up was last valued at $5.7 billion, when it raised $150 million in a round led by Qatar Investment Authority with participation from education technology investor Owl Ventures in July 2019.

General Atlantic, Tencent Holdings, Verlinvest, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board among others also back the start-up.

This is Tiger’s second investment in an Indian Edtech firm. Tiger has invested in live online tutoring firm Vedantu twice — in 2015, as one of the investors of its Series A round of $5 million, and last year, when it led the $42 million Series C round along with WestBridge Capital.

Positioned as a leader at the intersection of technology, media and content in education, Byju’s is a product company that offers personalised learning programmes for students from classes 1 to 12 (K-12) and aspirants of competitive exams, including the JEE, CAT and IAS entrance exams.

The start-up, which claims to have 40 million registered students and 2.8 million paid subscriptions, recently launched a new learning experience for younger children in classes 1-3 with Disney Byju’s Early Learn App in India, in association with Disney, which at last count had over 1 million registered students. The ed-tech start-up has also acquired Osmo, a Palo Alto-based education game making company.

According to Statista Research Department, the online education market in India is projected to reach about $2 billion in 2021, an increase from $250 million in 2016, at a growth rate of about 52 per cent.

With increased brand awareness, strong adoption among students and 85 per cent annual renewal from small towns and cities showing the increasing acceptance of digital learning as a primary tool for learning at home, Byju’s tripled its revenue to ₹1,430 crore in FY19 and also turned profitable on a full-year basis. The start-up crossed ₹200 crore in monthly revenue last year and competes with Vedantu, Khan Academy and meritnation.com.

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