More money is pouring into world’s most valued edtech company, India’s Byju’s. After having recently raised millions across multiple rounds at a $10B+ valuation, Byju’s is now raising $500 Million from US based private equity behemoth, Silver Lake. The round is valuing Byju’s at a mind boggling $10.8 billion, further extending its lead over peers as the world’s most valuable edtech company.
During its Series F funding round, which concluded in August, the company was valued at $10.5 billion, a testament to the company’s growth trajectory. The latest round also saw participation from existing investors including Tiger Global, General Atlantic, and Owl Ventures.
The previous round, today’s funding, and other investments in the year have led to Byju’s accumulating north of $1 billion in just 2020 itself. Apart from the series F funding round, it raised $122 million from Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global, as well as $100 million from US technology investor Bond in June.
The sudden outpouring of money into edtech isn’t surprising though, and is not limited to just Byju’s. The industry has grown leaps and bounds in just a few months, due to the rising need of remote learning emerging due to the pandemic. Since the lockdown started, Byju’s saw 20 million students enrolling on its platform for free to continue their learning at a time when schools around the country are closed. Moreover, the company has also managed to show skyrocketing growth in its paying user base, with 4.2 million students paying for a premium offering. Overall, the platform has about 64 million registrations.
This trend is not exclusive to just Byju’s, as rival platform Unacademy also announced that it has raised $150 million in a Series F funding round led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 2, fairly recently. The pandemic has pushed the platform past the billion dollar stage, as the company now sits at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Another ed tech platform, Eruditus, has also raised $113 million in a round backed by the Chan Facebook initiative for its platform that offers executive-level courses to students in 80 countries, backed by its partnerships with universities like MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, IIT, IIM, and NUS.
“We are fortunate to be in a sector of positive relevance during this crisis. This has brought online learning to the forefront and is helping parents, teachers and students experience and understand its value. Our classrooms are changing possibly for the first time in 100 years and I’m really excited about the opportunities that we have to redefine the future of learning,” Byju Raveendran, chief executive of Byju’s said in a statement.
