Byju's raises $200 mn from General Atlantic, current valuation at $8.2 bn

As a part of its ongoing funding round, edtech company Byju’s has raised $200 million in fresh funding from US-based growth equity investor General Atlantic (GA). GA is an existing investor in the Bengaluru-based firm.

The new funding comes just a month after it raised $200 million from Tiger Global Management, which valued the Bengaluru-based start-up at around $8 billion. With the fresh funding, the company’s valuation has now slightly gone up to $8.2 billion, according to sources.

“General Atlantic has been one of our strongest partners and this additional investment shows their confidence in our vision, growth and future. We are happy to see an ever-increasing acceptance for our learning programs in small towns across the country,” said Byju Raveendran, founder and chief executive of Byju’s.

“Today, over 65% of our students are from outside the top 10 cities. This is a validation of how technology can make high-quality learning content more accessible to students, irrespective of their geographies,” said Raveendran.

At the current valuation, Byju’s has already replaced ride-hailing firm Ola as the third-largest unicorn, next only to digital payments company Paytm and hotel network Oyo, which are valued around $16 billion and $10 billion, respectively.

Byju’s said that the fresh funding would help the firm towards creating personalised learning programs to transform the way students learn globally. The company which is backed by early investors such as Sequoia and Light Speed Ventures offers programmes for students in classes 1 to 12 while it also provides its service for competitive exams like JEE, NEET, CAT and IAS.  

The funding would help the company on launching programmes in vernacular languages to help students across all parts of the country learn better, it said. In addition to this, the company will also be launching the ‘Byju’s online tutoring programme’ in the coming months.

Byju’s which has 42 million registered users and 3 million paid subscribers, tripled its revenue to Rs 1480 crore in FY18-19 apart from becoming profitable on a full-year basis. In the ongoing fiscal, the company has set a target to touch Rs 3000 crore in revenues.