Byju’s trumps rivals as Covid fast-tracks ed-tech growth

Set to become India’s second start-up in the $10 bn valuation club

Some businesses are clearly burning bright despite the pandemic. Byju’s, India’s foremost ed-tech brand, saw the number of views on its website zoom from 14.37 million in March 2020 to 21.93 million in May. It’s a staggering 52 per cent increase (based on the data from Similarweb) and the key reason why Silicon Valley’s Mary Meeker-backed Bond Capital might invest in the company at a valuation of $10.5 billion.

Paytm is the only other start-up in India to command a valuation of more than $10 billion.

Analysts say the ed-tech start-up has profited hugely from the lockdown when students were forced to stay home and study online. According to Bofa Global Research, in

April Byju’s garnered about 6 million new users and the usage also went up by 2-3 times in a week, with some using it for as much as 100 minutes a day. At the industry level, the number of users (K-12 and beyond) also rose sharply — from 49 million in 2019 to 90 million in April 2020. According to management consultancy firm Redseer, the average time spent during this period also went up by over 50 per cent to 100 minutes in

April 2020 .

All this has made Byju’s race ahead of its competitors. For instance, Unacademy (11.61 million web viewers) and Vedantu (10.03 million viewers) had only about half the traffic that Byju’s had in May. With a traffic share of 33.49 per cent in April–may, Byju’s is now at the top of the charts, just above Toppr (the others are Embibe, Vedantu and Unacademy), according to Similarweb.

Little wonder, then, that the sector is attracting investors. According to Redseer, ed-tech is expected to grow from a user base of 45 million in 2019 to 150 million by 2022 at a CAGR of 49 per cent. The paid ed-tech market may balloon from 2.5 million users to over 20.2 million users in the same period. And revenues are expected to rise from $0.7 billion to $3.5 billion by 2022.

The rise in the valuation of Byju’s has been nothing short of spectacular. It was close to $8200 million in February 2020 when it raised $200 million from General Atlantic. The latest deal will reportedly put the into the $10 billion club — a phenomenal rise from its valuation of $470 million in September 2016.