Byju's: Billionaire Yuri Milner all set to invest US$ 400 million in Indian education startup
- IBEF
- August 4, 2020
DST Global, the investment firm headed by billionaire Mr Yuri Milner, is planning to invest as much as US$ 400 million in Indian online education start-up Byju’s.
It is expected that the deal will be signed by the end of the week and will take the deal values of Byju’s at US$ 10.5 billion. This will make the Byju’s India’s second-most valuable start-up after Alibaba Group Holding-backed financial payments brand, Paytm.
The Russian Israeli billionaire, one of the world’s best-known technology investors, is an early backer of the largest internet firms including Alibaba, Facebook Inc., and Twitter Inc. Other funded start-up by DST involves online retailer Flipkart Online Services Pvt., ride-hailing start-up Ola, food-delivery start-up Swiggy and business e-commerce start-up Udaan.
Though, no official statement was released by either of the company.
Byju’s has investors which include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Naspers Ltd., and Tiger Global Management, simplifies math and science concepts for K-12 students through games and videos. The start-up was founded by Mr Byju Raveendran, a former teacher and son of educators, who created the smartphone app in 2011. The app was launched at a time when the smartphones were becoming ubiquitous.
The app offers services to students from kindergarten through 12th grade and has over 57 million registered users and over 3.5 million paid subscribers. Around 300,000 new subscribers are added every month. In the year ended in March 2020, Byju’s doubled revenues to Rs 28 billion (US$ 373 million) from the previous financial year and is profitable, a rarity for Indian start-up.
It was seen that due to the coronavirus pandemic, India’s online education segment has received a much-needed boost as Government imposed lockdowns shuttered schools across the country, encouraging a never-before migration to online learning. It is estimated that about 250 million school-going children in the country have been affected by pandemic-induced school closures. Everyone has been forced to adopt digital learning tools that have triggered an unprecedented surge of users to online portals such as Byju’s run by Think & Learn Pvt.
This year alone, Byju’s has raised US$ 400 million and was last funded by Bond Capital co-founded by Silicon Valley investment guru, Mary Meeker, formerly of Kleiner Perkins. Other education start-ups are attracting backers, too. Last month, online learning start-up Vedantu raised US$ 100 million from U.S.-based investor Coatue Management. While the lead is taken by Unacademy, another leading start-up, as it has raised funds at a valuation of over US$ 1 billion, which would make it the country’s second edtech unicorn.
Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.
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