India's Byju's raises $800m at $22b valuation
Indian education platform Byju’s has raised USD 800m at an estimated valuation of USD 22bn, with the company’s founder Byju Raveendran providing USD 400m.
BlackRock, Sumeru Ventures, and Vitruvian Partners are among the other investors. It follows a USD 340m round featuring The Blackstone Group last year at a post-money valuation of USD 16.5bn and positions Byju’s as possibly India’s most valuable start-up. An IPO is considered imminent.
“We continue to witness accelerated growth in India and international markets through both organic and inorganic routes,” Raveendran (pictured) said according to Livemint, which noted the 41-year-old entrepreneur owned about one-third of the company.
“Our sustained focus is on achieving our long-term goals around creating life-long value for our learners. For that, we are imagining and reimagining the way students will learn, unlearn and relearn in future.”
Launched in 2015, Byju’s offers K-12 education videos, primarily serving students and exam candidates outside metro areas. M&A has also driven much of the growth, with the company acquiring local rival Whitehat Jr in 2020 for USD 300m.
The company describes itself as paving the way for new-age, geography-agnostic learning services that sit at the cross-section of mobile, interactive content and personalised methodologies. Much of the business model is based on making learning feel like play contextually and visually.
COVID-19 is believed to have been a significant boost to product uptake, with the user base currently exceeding 100m students and 6.5m paid subscribers globally. This compares to 80m students, including 5.5m annual paid subscribers, as of mid-2021 and 64m students and 4.2m paid subscribers in September 2020.
Annual revenue is said to have doubled during the 2021 financial year to about USD 800m. Byju’s is reportedly profitable but has failed to meet its profit targets due to costs associated with its rapid expansion. In addition to Whitehat, recent bolt-ons include Scholr, Osmo, and Toppr.
In the past year, Byju’s has committed USD 1bn to an expansion in North America, including the USD 500m acquisition of Epic, a reading platform targeting children aged 12 and younger. It is also active in the US with Future School, an online one-on-one live learning platform that aims to empower women teachers to help students learn math and coding in an engaging and interactive way.
Byju’s previous investors include Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Edelweiss Private Equity, IIFL Alternate Asset Advisors, Oxshott Capital Partners, Time Capital, Verition Fund Management, Asmaan Ventures, Mirae Asset Global Investments, and UBS.
Silver Lake, Tiger Global Management, General Atlantic, and US education specialist Owl Ventures invested about USD 500m in 2020.
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