Indian Edtech Giant Byju?s Gearing Up to Raise $400 Mn to Become a Decacorn

Bengaluru, India-based Byju?s is in talks with investors to raise a sum of $400 million. If the funding goes through, Byju?s will be valued at over $10 billion, making it a decacorn and the second highest valued startup in the country along with hospitality startup OYO and after financial services startup Paytm, which was valued at $16 billion after it raised $1 billion last year.

The current additional funding will be a part of the ongoing funding round of Byju?s which has already seen investments from Tiger Global ($200 million in January) and General Atlantic (undisclosed amount in February), who, in total, have invested between $300 million to $350 million. The latter two investments came in when Byju?s was valued at $8 billion, as per a report in TechCrunch.

The nine-year old startup raised $150 Million from Qatar Investment Authority and Owl Ventures last year in July. At the time, it was valued at $5.75 billion.

Till now, Byju?s has raised over $1.3 billion, and South Africa-based Prosus Ventures is the largest external investor in Byju?s.

Byju?s has recently added 6 million students to its platform, since the start of the lockdown in late March in India due to coronavirus breakout, with the traffic on the app and website being up by 150% in March. Other edtech platforms like Unacademy and ClassPlus have also seen a rise in their number of users. In another news, Chennai, India-based programming course platform GUVI raised USD 800,000 in a pre-series A funding round, after it saw a rise in its user base by 150,000 new subscriptions in just 12 days.

Pennsylvania, USA-based language learning platform Duolingo also recently raised $10 million from General Atlantic. It seems that edtech companies that are performing well during this time are set to grow with increased fundings.

Byju?s has over 35 million users, of which about 2.4 million users are paid users, as of last year. The platform teaches difficult educational concepts for K-12 students in easy ways. It also offers preparation courses for under and post-graduate students. The platform recently adjusted its videos? English accent and made adaptations to different education systems across the world.