BYJU is a startup that offers online tutoring and test preparation courses for school students and their parents. It was founded by Byju Raveendran in 2015 and has raised over $350 million from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings Ltd., and Sofina SA. BYJU’s became the most valued private company in India within just five years of its establishment! In this blog post, we will discuss how BYJU’s did it?
BYJU’s – Latest News
- 21st June 2021 – India Infoline Finance Limited (IIFL) and Maitri Edtech contribute another $50 million to BYJU.
- June, 2021-BYJU’S has surpassed Paytm as India’s most valuable startup. In a recent fundraising round led by UBS Group and Zoom founder Eric Yuan, Blackstone, and other organizations, the Bangalore-based startup raised $350 million, valuing the company at $16.5 billion.
- April 8, 2021-BYJU’S has launched the BYJU’S Future School, a global one-on-one learning platform. The new platform will be offered in six different countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico.
- April 7, 2021 -BYJU’s is planned to go public before April 2023
- January 13, 2021-BYJU’s has agreed to buy Aakash Educational Services Ltd., a leading brick-and-mortar test prep company, for $1 billion. Aakash Institute has over 200 physical locations and tutors students for engineering and medical school admissions.
- November 2020 -In a recent $200 million fundraising round sponsored by BlackRock and T Rowe Price, BYJU was valued at $12 billion.
- September 2020 -For an undisclosed sum, BYJU purchased LabInApp, a firm that provides lab-like simulations via a mobile app for scientific students. BYJU has also raised $500 million in a new round of funding from Silver Lake.
- August 2020 -WhiteHat Jr., an Edtech business, was acquired by BYJU for $300 million in cash. This makes the 18-month-old Mumbai-based WhiteHat Jr., which provides online coding training to school-aged youngsters in India and the United States, the Indian startup ecosystem’s fastest exit story at this scale.
- June 2020 -BYJU has received funding from ‘BOND,’ the first female-founded venture capital firm. The amount of funding has not been revealed. The author of the famous “Internet Trends” report and a former Kleiner Perkins member, Mary Meeker, co-founded the $1.25 billion venture capital fund.
About BYJU’s and How BYJU’s Works
BYJU is an education startup that provides learning content in the form of video lectures and tests. Professors founded it at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Harvard to provide affordable quality education for all students worldwide. BYJU helps school students prepare for class exams like JEE Main Exam, NEET UG Medical Exam, SNAP Exam, etc. BYJU’S has a team of 300+ tutors who are experts in various subjects like Physics, Chemistry, and English to provide students with personalized help at an affordable cost.
BYJU’s Founder
Byju Raveendran is the founder of BYJU’s Classes, an educational technology company with the slogan “Fall in love with learning.” BYJU’s founder and CEO, Byju Raveendran, was born in Azhikode, Kerela, in 1980. He graduated from Government Engineering College in Kannur, Kerela, with a B.Tech in mechanical engineering.
Byju Raveendran worked as a service engineer for a multinational shipping company before founding BYJU’s. However, teaching was his true calling, which led him to start BYJU.
How was BYJU’s Started?
Byju Raveendran, a native of Azhikode, a small hamlet in Kerala, worked as an engineer for a shipping company in the United Kingdom. While working, he began to assist his friends in preparing for the CAT exam, and to put himself to the test, Byju took the exam and received a perfect score! He did not enroll in any of the IIMs and instead began tutoring kids in preparation for their mathematics examinations.
He took free mathematics workshops at first, but he began charging a charge once he was confident in his abilities. His workshops were so popular at one point that more than 20000 students attended one of them. He began filming films of the workshops he hosted in 2009, and he hasn’t stopped since. In 2015, he released Byju’s – The Learning App, which over 5.5 million people were downloaded in its first year.
BYJU’s – Revenue Model
BYJU’s makes money in three different ways:
- The first method is to use the app. Students must purchase the courses after the 15-day free trial to continue their educational journey on BYJU’s. The app provides a range of test series, courses, and other features that entice users to pay.
- Customers must purchase electronic tablets from BYJU’s when they purchase the course of their choosing. This tablet contains the course’s videos, tests, practice questions, quizzes, and other materials.
- Classroom teaching is the third revenue-generating strategy. These classes are only available in a few cities.
Challenges faced by BYJU’s
- The learning management system was not robust enough.
- BYJU’s had to overcome the problem of content creation, which is expensive and time-consuming.
- Necessity gave rise to the invention: BYJU’s created their own proprietary video distribution platform called `Inner Space.’ This helped them circumvent these problems and also reduced the cost of content production.
- The company was not able to communicate with its teachers effectively, leading to an improper feedback loop.
BYJU’s – Competitors/Alternatives
People are progressively adopting digital technology and e-learning. Many other companies with a model similar to BYJU’s are focused on ed-tech due to this change. Meritnation.com, Toppr, Vedantu, Teachable, Simplilearn, Schoolwise, and Khan Academy are BYJU’s main competitors.
