Byju’s has dethroned Paytm to develop into the country’s most important start out-up immediately after it secured close to $350 million in fresh funding from a clutch of investors like UBS Group, Blackstone, Abu Dhabi state fund ADQ, Phoenix Rising and Zoom founder & CEO Eric Yuan, the company’s filings with the RoC showed.
The most up-to-date investment values the business at about $16.5 billion. Paytm is valued at $16 billion.
Byju’s did not respond to FE’s queries.
The funding is understood to be an extension of the Bengaluru-based ed-tech firm’s broader more than $1 billion monetary round it has been raising in tranches. As portion of the investment, the Byju Raveendran-led startup was backed by a group of investors like Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group, Baron Funds, XN Exponent Holdings and other individuals at a valuation of about $15 billion earlier this year. The current $350 million investment requires the total size of the funding round to more than $1.5 billion.
Bulk of the capital raised will be used to fund a spate of acquisitions Byju’s has lined up. In April, the firm acquired brick-and-mortar test prep service provider Aakash Educational Services (AESL) in a close to $1 billion money and stock deal. Byju’s is also understood to have acquired rival Toppr in a transaction estimated to be more than $one hundred million the deal has not but been formally announced. Besides, it is also closing in on discussions to obtain other associated enterprises like Great Learning and Gradeup, according to reports.
The ed-tech space led by Byju’s also cornered the bulk of the start out-up funding in 2020 as the pandemic led to a boom in subscriptions for on line educational services. A bunch of investors like new backers like Silver Lake and Alkeon Capital collectively infused more than $1 billion into the business last year.
Byju’s that claims to have as numerous as 80 million registered customers and 5.5 million subscribers, saw its revenues double in FY21 more than the prior year.
In an interview with FE in late September last year, founder & CEO Byju Raveendran pointed out the business added more than 25 million absolutely free customers on the platform in between April and August compared with just above 40 million in the initial 4-and-a-half years.
The market place size of Indian ed-tech sector is estimated to develop by 3.7 instances in the next 5 years, to touch $10.4 billion by 2025 from $2.8 billion in 2020, according to a current report by EY-IVCA. The segment will see more than 37 million paid customers by 2025.