Unicorns #3: Byju's

Guess which is India’s most valuable unicorn today? It’s the educational app, Byju’s. As Ashish B writes in his biography of the company, COVID-19 helped the company’s growth as online education became common.

 

The company’s founder, the eponymous Malayalee named Byju Raveendran did his schooling at a government school in Kerala – both his parents were teachers (in Maths and Physics). Rote learning did not appeal to him at all; he preferred to visualize concepts, a technique that would become part of Byju’s teaching system.

 

He did engineering, not medicine, because only engineering would give the “time to play sports”. Having completed his Mechanical engineering, he started working as a service engineer for a shipping company and got to see the world.

 

His friends, who were preparing for the IIM (CAT) exams, sought his help with the Maths side of things - He had an aptitude for teaching. In Bangalore, he was soon taking classes for around 40 students. It soon increased to 1,200 students. This was when Byju decided to quit his job and pursue teaching.

 

Soon there was demand from other cities as well. His weekends were spent travelling across Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Pune. As demand grew, he added 5 more cities and was flying on weekdays as well. This would stay as his schedule for 3 years. In 2009, he decided to conduct online classes for CAT – and the city count expanded to 45. In person classes could no longer be accommodated in normal venues – he was soon booking indoor stadiums. Around this time, Byju felt it was far better if students got the basics right – which is what caused his focus to shift to school education. In 2011, he formed the Think and Learn Pvt Ltd company, for classes 4 to 12.

 

When smartphones and high-speed Internet began to become popular and affordable in India, he realized that education could be fun, if formatted and presented right. In 2012, Ranjan Pai and Mohandas Pai (he of Infosys fame) became the first investors in the company, but they did that on the condition that Byju shift to online only mode - online stuff can scale, plus content would be available at a time and place of the student’s choice. Byju agreed and they paid ₹50 crores for a 25% stake in the company.

 

A couple of years of effort later, in 2015, the Byju’s Learning App was launched – it’s visual aid and animation was impressive. Within a year, the app had been downloaded 55 lakh times and got Facebook’s attention, who invested in it. This was huge publicity for the app.

 

In 2017, Shah Rukh Khan became its brand ambassador. The same year, the Parent Connect App was launched, to allow parents to track the progress and performance of their kids. The company acquired the license to use Disney characters in its app. It would soon become a case study at Harvard.

 

A year later, in 2018, Byju’s became India’s 11th unicorn – a billion-dollar company. Today, it is the official sponsor of the Indian cricket team, and based on the last round of investing, valued at $21 billion. If the IPO being planned in the US markets goes through, it might even list as high as $45 billion.

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