facebook-page-view
Advertisement

Byju’s close to raising up to $50 mn from new set of investors

By Manu P Toms

  • 23 Jul 2016

Test preparation course provider Byju's Classes, incorporated as Think & Learn Pvt. Ltd, is about to close a fresh round worth $25-50 million in the next three weeks for its international expansion. The new round comes a few months after raising $75 million from Belgium-based Sofina and Sequoia Capital. "The company has interests from four new investors, including World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) but it is yet to decide whom to take money from," a person directly involved in the deal talks told VCCircle.

After seeing strong growth in the domestic online tuition market, Byju's is building a new tech-enabled educational product targeting school-going students in English speaking countries such as the US and the UK and commonwealth countries such as Australia and South Africa. "The company is looking for investors who can aid in its growth in these markets and IFC can be one of them. The deal will be finalised in two weeks and money - that will be anywhere between $25 million and $50 million - will be in the bank in three weeks. The company usually completes a round fast," the person said. Some of the existing investors including Sofina, Sequoia and Lightspeed Ventures may also participate in the upcoming round.

He did not disclose the names of other potential new investors but said some of them have not yet made any venture capital investments in the country.

Advertisement

Meanwhile, IFC said it proposed to invest up $15 million in Byju's to finance its education services offering, technology development and potential inorganic expansion. According to the 'summary of investment information' that IFC put out on its site, the proposal has been put forward for the consideration of IFC board of directors at a meeting on August 5. IFC as well as the person cited above said this does not mean a deal between the both is certain. "For IFC, it is mandatory to put out details of the investments it proposes to do. It is not the final outcome," the person said.

Byju's stands out in a constrained funding environment by doing back-to-back fundraising totalling $100-125 million. VCCircle earlier this month reported that Aarin Capital, the early investor in Byju's, part-exited with huge gains. VCCircle first reported that Lightspeed Ventures picked a stake in the company. It has turned out that Lightspeed bought most of Aarin's stake in secondary sale.

Bangalore-based Byju's, founded in 2011 by Byju Raveendran, offers mobile-based digital K-12 and test prep education services across India and some parts of Middle East. The company, which started off with tuition classes across Bangalore, recently embarked on the digital expansion. Its  K-12 education product ‘The Learning App’ has seen downloads in excess of 4.5 million in less than 10 months since launch, and more than 43% of its paid users are located outside India’s top-10 cities, according to the IFC note. "The Indian market is estimated to be the largest globally for K-12 education with more than 250 million new enrollments per year. However, good quality teachers are in short supply with access usually limited to metros and other tier 1 cities," it added. 

Advertisement

This has apparently provided huge opportunity for Byju's. "The company sees 2.5 times growth in India with monthly revenues worth around Rs 30 crore. Growing at this rate, it would not need external funding for India business," the person said. 

An e-mail query sent to a company spokesperson did not immediately elicit a response.

Like this report? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get our top reports.

Advertisement

Share article on

Advertisement
Advertisement