How maths teacher Anita Kishore seals acquisition deals for Byju’s

In 2006, Byju Raveendran, now the tutor-turned-tech entrepreneur, visited Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute in Mumbai to deliver a session on maths for competitive exams. In the audience was a mechanical engineering student, Anita Kishore.

“It was brilliant. I liked the session and the way he approached and thought about math. I went up to him and asked him to take a few more sessions,” said Kishore. “I told him there is an auditorium and 500 students in our college and I would make sure to fill it up.”

Attending that first session was a turning point in Kishore’s life, who joined ed-tech start-up Byju’s founded by Raveendran in 2011. Kishore, 33, rose through the ranks and is now the chief strategy officer of Byju’s, which has become the world’s most valuable edtech firm with a valuation of $16.5 billion.

She is the strategist behind some of the biggest acquisitions made by Byju’s. Kishore, along with Raveendran, takes part in talks to do the acquisition deals, strategic partnerships, and raise large funding rounds. These include the $1-billion acquisition of New Delhibased Aakash Educational Services in April and the $600million buy of Singapore’s Great

Learning, a leading global player in the professional and higher education segment, in July.

“It is not a very large (M&A) team. It is primarily the two (Raveendran and Kishore) of us,” said Kishore, a mechanical engineer who has an MBA from Iim-ahmedabad. Before Byju’s, she worked at Boston Consulting Group and had a brief stint as a summer associate at Lehman Brothers. “We have seen inorganic opportunities work well and have been able to integrate businesses and the products. While the organic growth continues to be strong, we see inorganic (route) another pillar for us as we expand.”

Byju’s is on an acquisition spree to grow rapidly in India and globally as the Covid pandemic has accelerated the adoption of online education. Students and professionals are looking to upgrade their skills, while schools and offices remain shut.

Byju’s has acquired about six companies across India and the US this year and spent over $2 billion over the last six months on these acquisitions, according to the sources. The inorganic route is expected to help the Bengalurubased Byju’s quickly dominate the ed-tech market, which has witnessed a boom due to the pandemic. It is helping the firm increase its lead over its competitors such as Softbank-backed Unacademy, Vedantu, Simplilearn, Upgrad, Amazon Academy, and traditional education institutes.

“None of these firms were looking at selling. Most of the founders wanted to continue to build,” said Kishore. “We see these acquisitions more as partnerships or integration. The founders continue to run the business independently.”

The approach for acquisitions is not about having a specific budget or number of targets but assessing complementarity. One such major acquisition is Us-based educational gaming company Osmo. Byju’s closed Osmo’s acquisition, its first overseas one, for $120 million in a stock-and-cash deal in 2019, propelling the Indian start-up to tap global markets, especially the US. The company brought physical tools into the digital world through augmented reality and its proprietary reflective artificial intelligence technology. “The core technology is the reason we decided to acquire Osmo,” she said . Osmo’s revenue of $25 million that time has grown four times in two years to around $110 million.

In July, Byju’s acquired Usbased digital reading platform Epic for $500 million, strengthening its position in the edtech sector. The acquisition will help Byju’s expand its US footprint by providing access to the more than two million teachers and 50 million kids in Epic’s existing global user base, which more than doubled over the last year. Epic, meant for children up to 12 years of age, has a collection of over 40,000 popular, highquality books, audiobooks, and videos from more than 250 of the world’s best publishers available on subscription. “As we scale up internationally and, in the US, which is a key market for us, there is a strong complementarity (in terms) of distribution that Epic has,” said Kishore.

Byju’s is aiming to become one of the largest players in the space in the US, with a target to hit revenues of $1 billion in the next three years.

In the domestic market, Byju’s closed the deal to acquire Aakash Educational Services for nearly $1 billion in April. With over 215 centres and a student count of over 250,000, Aakash provided test preparatory services to students preparing for medical and engineering entrance exams, school and board exams. Kishore said when Byju’s was looking at tapping the test preparation space, it realised the future of learning was hybrid and this union of Aakash and Byju’s will bring together the best of offline and online learning.

Last year, Byju’s acquired Mumbai-based coding start-up Whitehat Jr for $300 million in a cash deal. However, a year after selling his start-up, Whitehat Jr founder Karan Bajaj decided to move on this month. Kishore said Bajaj’s decision to move on after a year was already part of the plan.

When asked about the challenge of having enough leaders to run so many businesses, she said the company added strong talent at the top and expanded the bandwidth at these firms. For instance, Trupti Mukker, a top executive at Whitehat Jr and an alumnus of Iim-bangalore, is leading the firm. But Kishore said Byju’s has given the founders of the businesses it has acquired the independence to operate separately.

Kishore doesn’t follow any playbook or consult M&A and venture capital experts for leading acquisitions at the firm. She has learnt most of the skills related to negotiations and closing deals on the ground over these years at Byju’s. “Some of the transactions that we have done are the largest in the industry,” said Kishore. “There wouldn’t be many venture capitalists or private equity (people) who would have done transactions of this size (in edtech).”

One of the biggest factors that helped Kishore seal these deals is convincing the founders of the acquired companies about the vision of the partnership.

“The biggest thing that drives us is the vision to help more children learn better and fall in love with learning,” said Kishore, who also is a maths teacher at Byju’s.

WE HAVE CLEARLY SEEN INORGANIC OPPORTUNITIES WORK WELL AND HAVE BEEN ABLE TO INTEGRATE BUSINESSES AND THE PRODUCTS. WHILE THE ORGANIC GROWTH CONTINUES TO BE STRONG, WE SEE INORGANIC (ROUTE) ANOTHER PILLAR FOR US AS WE EXPAND” ANITA KISHORE

Chief strategy officer, Byju’s