Byju’s money raising spree isn’t ending yet. Just a couple of months ago, after raising a massive $400 Million from some marquee global investors, Byju’s has raised a fres $11.3 Million round from General Atlantic and Tencent.
This fresh capital comes in from General Atlantic and Tencent. According to reports, General Atlantic has pumped in Rs 33.28 crore for over 4,000 compulsorily convertible cumulative preference shares. The company’s valuation is now believed to be a touch over $4 billion. In its previous funding round, the company was valued at $3.6 billion.
Byju Raveendran, the founder of the company, continues to be the single largest shareholder in the company, with 21.84% stake, while Naspers holds 11.82%. Sequoia, having invested through three entities, has cumulative ownership of 14.2%, and the company’s other co-founders Riju Raveendran and Divya Gokulnath holding 8.75% and 4.47% respectively.
Byju’s started out as an offline teaching center in Bengaluru in 2008 and launched its digital education platform in 2015 in order to increase its user base. The company is operating two separate learning apps — one catering to students from Classes VI to XII and one that caters to students from Classes IV and V.
Since its foundation in 2008, the company has managed to raise more than $240 million in funding from Tencent, Verlinvest, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Aarin Capital among others. All of those rounds were primarily targeted at geographic expansions.
In June this year, Byju’s claimed that the company has touched ₹100 crore in monthly revenue and also raised its annual revenue target for this year to ₹1,400 crore. The company claims that it is among the few profitable unicorns in the country. However, there is no official publicly available data to back that claim.
