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Alakh Pandey literally wears his love for Physics on his sleeves. The co-founder of PhysicsWallah, which is tipped to be the next edtech unicorn, has his arms tattooed with Einstein’s famous equation E = mc² and mathematical constant π.
Pandey told BusinessLine that he started teaching because of a financial crisis at home only to later realise that teaching is his life’s calling. But in 2017, when Pandey revived his existing Youtube channel and started posting tutorials of Class 11 Physics and some parts of Chemistry upto the JEE mains level, little would he imagined where his channel PhysicsWallah would take him.
Rejected lucrative offers
The channel today has 6.87 million subscribers on YouTube and across multiple channels PhysicsWallah has about 1 crore subscribers.
“After I started monetising my Youtube Channel, I was earning pretty decent money but edtech giants (like Unacademy) offered me 6-7 times of that money. People even wanted to acquire my YouTube channel and build a brand out of it,” he says. He refused as he says the emotion and connect he built with his students was one of a kind.
Alakh Pandey, co-founder, PhysicsWallah
What worked
In 2020, Pandey joined hands with co-founder Prateek Maheshwari to launch PhysicsWallah’s standalone app. The company today commands a revenue of ₹350 crore (FY22) and claims a 60 per cent profit margin. After being bootstrapped for almost two years, Pandey is now in talks to raise a $100-million funding round at a unicorn valuation ($1 billion).
One of the differentiator for PhysicsWallah’s courses is its low cost as compared to existing online companies. The first batch launched by the company in May 2020 was priced at ₹999 and attracted 60,000 students. From 2020 to now, PhysicsWallah’s team has scaled to 1,600 employees and runs close to 55 to 60 batches targetting students from classes 9 to 12. Pandey says the company wants to expand its courses to cater to students in 6, 7 and 8 standards as well as reach out to regional language audiences.
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