Byju’s Latest Funding Gives 7X Returns To Zuckerberg’s Investment

Bengaluru-based edtech unicorn Byju’s is on its way to join the decacorn club, after being recently valued at $8 Bn in its funding round. As a result, the company has delivered handsome returns to the investors who have taken partial exit in the latest round.

A Business Insider report said that with the latest funding rounds of Byju’s, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative has got INR 167.7 Cr in a partial exit for its INR 22.86 Cr investment in September 2016. It is being reported that Chan Zuckerberg’s investment is now worth at least seven times more.

The same deal is also reported to have given handsome returns to Sequoia, Times Internet and SCHF PV Mauritius. Its existing investors include General Atlantic, Tencent, Naspers, Qatar Investment Authority, and Canada’s Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) among others.

Founded in 2008 by Divya Gokulnath and Byju Raveendran, Byju’s offers a learning app, which was launched in 2015 and has learning programmes for students in classes IV-XII, along with courses to help students prepare for competitive exams like JEE, NEET, CAT, IAS, GRE, and GMAT.

Byju’s said that with the latest funding, it is working on launching programs in vernacular languages to help students across the country. In addition to this, the company will also be launching the ‘Byju’s Online Tutoring Program’ in the coming months.

The company said it has 42 Mn registered users and 3 Mn paid subscribers. Students are spending 71 minutes on the app daily and the annual renewal rates are 85%.

Byju’s had tripled its revenue from INR 520 Cr to INR 1480 Cr in FY 18-19 and turned profitable on a full-year basis. The company now says that it is on track to double its revenues to INR 3000 Cr in the current financial year.

The impact Byju’s has created has been highlighted in Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2019 report. The report said that Byju’s number of paying students between the ages of 9-17, had crossed over 1.5 Mn in March 2019 from the 1 Mn mark in the last financial year.

According to Datalabs By Inc42, in FY19, the size of India’s education sector stood at $101 Bn and its online education market at $563 Mn. To put it into perspective, the country’s online education system comprised a mere 0.56% of the overall education sector.

The Edtech report by DataLabs by Inc42 says that by 2021 the online education market in India is estimated to be worth $2 Bn. The report added that between 2015-2019, edtech startups have raised $1.8 Bn across 303 deals.

Digital evolution and the boom in smartphone adoption are expected to define the way Indian students learn. Real-time book updates, online tutoring, edutainment, online test preparation, web-based research, and gamification — technology has changed our traditional education system in more ways than one.

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