PhysicsWallah Launches 50 ‘Vidyapeeth Centres’ With $10 Mn Investment In Tech Innovation

Edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah (PW) on Monday (May 1) announced the launch of its 50 offline centres, branded as ‘Vidyapeeth Centers’, across India, with an investment of about $10 Mn in tech innovation.

The startup has rolled out the new centres in Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Karnataka, among other states. PhysicsWallah is already running 11 such Vidyapeeth centres.

“Vidyapeeth centres will offer support for more than 15 hours a day, and students will also have the provision to escalate any issue to our head office via the PW app,” said PW co-founder Prateek Maheshwari, adding that Vidyapeeth is a tech-integrated offline classroom, offering cost-effective and in-depth training with well-researched course material and India’s best faculty. 

Last month, too, there were initial reports about this development, according to which, the edtech startup was looking to invest $5 Mn in the first phase to set up infrastructure for its school-integrated course. Later on, the remaining $5 Mn was planned to be deployed in creating content, development of pedagogy, and academic upgradation of schools.

PW’s Vidyapeeth centres promise to offer students with regular daily practice problems, homework monitoring, and video quizzes, which can be accessed on the parent-student dashboard. 

“We aim to help parents save money that would have been spent on hostel fees and other living expenses – which is typically twice the amount of academic fees. In terms of academics, we will also conduct extra classes and regular tests for students while also providing them with a test analytics dashboard to help them prepare well for competitive exams,” PW founder Alakh Pandey said.

Founded in 2020 by Pandey and Maheshwari, PW largely caters to students preparing for engineering and medical entrance exams. The edtech startup provides its educational content in seven languages – Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, and Gujarati. It has over 22 Mn subscribers across 39 YouTube channels.

The startup claims to have crossed more than 90K registration in the current academic year and aims to reach 1.5 Lakh during the session for JEE and NEET foundation exams preparations, as per PTI. 

PW also claims to have provided scholarships worth $12 Mn through its Scholarship and Admission Test (SAT) in the 2023-24 academic year. It aims to reward $20 Mn in scholarships in the next academic year.

PW also said in a statement that it plans to recruit over 1,200 faculty members across India in the coming days.

It must be noted that amid a severe downfall of the Indian edtech ecosystem, PW has managed to strengthen its books despite several internal and market challenges.

While edtech majors like BYJU’S, Vedantu, and Unacademy are struggling with losses, PhysicsWallah reported an over 14X year-on-year (YoY) jump in net profit to INR 97.8 Cr in FY22.

There were reports in March that PW was in talks to raise at least $250 Mn at a valuation of $3.3 Bn.

As per Inc42’s Layoff Tracker, the Indian edtech startups have laid off over 9,000 employees since March 2022.