Bengaluru-based edtech major Think and Learn Pvt. Ltd., the company that owns and operates K-12 learning app Byju’s, announced it has raised a fresh funding from its existing investor General Atlantic.
While the company did not disclose the amount of funding, sources familiar with the matter said that the New York-based private equity firm had pumped in $200 million in the new round at a valuation of $8 billion. The announcement comes weeks after the company had raised another $200 million from Tiger Global in January.
Commenting on the latest development, Byju Raveendran, Founder and CEO of Byju’s, said in a statement,
"General Atlantic has been one of our strongest partners and this additional investment shows their confidence in our vision, growth and future. We are happy to see an ever increasing acceptance for our learning programs in small towns across the country. Today, over 65% of our students are from outside the top 10 cities. This is a validation of how technology can make high-quality learning content more accessible to students, irrespective of their geographies. In fact, technology as an enabler has a lot of potential to further innovate the way in which learning can be made personalized and impactful."
Launched in 2015, Byju’s creates learning programs for K-12 students as well as for competitive exams. The edtech startup managed to turn profitable in June 2018 after achieving $14.3 million in monthly revenue, as the number of paid users increased. The company now claims to have over 40 million registered users and three million paid subscribers from both rural and urban areas in India. According to the company, the average number of minutes a student spends on the app has increased from 64 minutes to 71 minutes per day over the last year.
Byju's said it is currently working on launching programs in vernacular languages to help students across the country. Additionally, the company said it will also launch the 'Byju's Online Tutoring Program' in the coming months.
Earlier, lauding and dubbing Byju’s as the leader in the Indian edtech sector, Scott Shleifer, Partner at Tiger Global, said in a statement,
“Byju’s has emerged as the leader in the Indian education-tech sector. They are pioneering technology shaping the future of learning for millions of school students in India. We are excited to support Byju and the team.”
According to reports, Byju’s is likely to raise, through the course of 2020, upwards of $1 billion, and is reported to be in talks with multiple investors, including from certain US-based endowment funds. The company is said to have raised around $995 million to date from Naspers Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd., VerInvest Group SA, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Sequoia Capital India, among others. It has forecast revenue of Rs 3,000 crore in the 2019-20 financial year. In FY19, the company tripled its revenue from Rs 520 crore to Rs 1,480 crore and turned profitable on a full-year basis.
