manize nayani on February 2, 2020
Byju Raveendran is the CEO and Founder of Think & Learn Pvt. Ltd. has created an app named after the founder himself: BYJU. This online educational services company offers technology-based education services in India. The 37-year-old entrepreneur has collaborated with Walt Disney to create animated games, stories, quizzes and interactive educational content or what some call ‘Disney-fy’ learning. Imagine having Simba or Anna teach Maths and English to learners from grades 1 to 3! According to Raveendran, “Kids everywhere relate to Disney’s Simba or Moana, who grip kids’ attention before we take them through the loop of learning.” According to this article, this venture is backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The company’s founder grew up in a small village in southern India, who studied to become an engineer. Later, he started teaching friends and students in his spare time and coached them to crack some of the toughest engineering entrance exams in the country. To read more: https://byjus.com
There is much more to this ed-tech business than just adding Disney effect.
What started as a passion for teaching and coaching students, has turned into a business ‘due to its impact’ says, the founder of this billion-dollar unicorn enterprise, Byju Raveendran. The company has certainly benefitted from the recent pandemic of Covid-19 as millions of parents turned to its courses online across India. But, the founder’s strategy of aggressive marketing, the acquisition of smaller ed-tech ventures, speaks volumes about his business acumen.
Recently, the company acquired White Hat Jr. a coding platform for students at K-12 and broader ed-tech sector. Acquisition of Osmo, an ed-tech start up based in the US, last year, opened doors to him to the new markets in the western world too. Last week BYJU’s acquired LabInApp, a start-up in India, which creates virtual simulations of science experiments, to aid learning even without access to science labs at this time of the pandemic.
BYJU aims to empower 5 million children with education by 2025.The company is proud of its accomplishment in the ed-tech sphere with 64 million registered users and 4.2 million annual paid subscribers. It has an added 20 million new free users in the past few months.
Raveendran stresses on the need for dynamic planning, faster execution of plans and a strong team for success in business.
The recent news on Economic times states, “BYJU’s, which had raised a total of around $916 million up until the end of 2019, seems to have raised close to or more than that in 2020 alone. It’s valuation too has ratcheted up from $5.7 billion in July 2019 to $11.1 billion presently”
Talking about investments from giant global investors, he says “partnerships like these reaffirm our commitment to build and transform the global learning landscape through technology, innovation and quality pedagogy.”