Byju Raveendran, a celebrity tutor who developed an education app that has grown into a valuation of almost $6 billion in about seven years, is the newest entrant to join the billionaire club after his Think & Learn Pvt scored $150 million in funding earlier this month. That deal conferred a value of $5.7 billion on the company in which the founder owns more than 21%.
Raveendran, who has said he wants to do for Indian education what the Mouse House did for entertainment, is taking his biggest step yet geographically and creatively. Its closing coincided with the announcement that the Byju’s app will team up with Walt Disney Co and take its service to American shores by early 2020. In his new app, Disney staples from The Lion King's Simba to Frozen's Anna teach math and English to students from grades one through three. The same characters star in animated videos, games, stories and interactive quizzes. "Kids everywhere relate to Disney's Simba or Moana, who grip kids' attention before we take them through the loop of learning," said Raveendran, also chief executive officer.
Education technology for kindergarten to 12th grade is one of the fastest-growing segments of India's internet market, said Anil Kumar, chief executive officer of Redseer Management Consulting Pvt. "Indian education startups are well set to seize the global opportunity given that they already cater to a large English-speaking base and have created unique education content," he said.
Byju's own fortunes have spiraled alongside the market. Its revenues are expected to more than double to £300 million in the year ending March 2020, Raveendran said. That pace of growth has already caught the attention of some of the industry's biggest investors from Naspers Ventures and Tencent Holdings Ltd to Sequoia Capital and Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan. Those big-name backers buy Raveendran's vision.
The young entrepreneur hails from Azhikode, a coastal village in Kerala, where his parents were school-teachers. He was a reluctant pupil, playing hooky to frequent the football field, then learning on his own at home. He became an engineer and then began helping friends crack entrance exams to top Indian engineering and management schools. The classes swelled till he finally began teaching thousands in sports stadiums, becoming a celebrity tutor who commuted between multiple cities during weekends.
He set up Think & Learn in 2011, offering online lessons before launching his main app in 2015. The business has signed up more than 35 million of whom about 2.4 million pay an annual fee of Rs 10,000 to 12,000, helping it became profitable in the year ending March 2019. That's when Raveendran began courting long-term investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds - his latest backer is the Qatar Investment Authority. In Byju's latest funding round, the entrepreneur bought shares to maintain his equity level. Along with his wife and brother, the Raveendran clan now holds a total stake of about 35 per cent, said the people familiar with Byjyu.
Byju's approach is simple - captivate kids by transforming the content to fit short attention spans. Raveendran has always harboured ambitions to crack English-speaking countries, and has flown in YouTube stars to feature in his videos.
