The World Is His Classroom

From being India’s leading edtech player, unicorn Byju’s has ambitions of becoming the world’s largest education company. Will the journey beyond the shores be as smooth as it has been on home turf so far?

- Suman K. Jha

ANNUR IN KERALA CONJURES up the imagery of bloody political clashes between the Left and the RSS/BJP. This coastal district is where Byju Raveendran spent his childhood and early youth. Byju had nothing to do with either Left or Right, though. His passion was Math and sports.

Math is fun. So is a business. This is the line that Byju repeats before investors — that “he does business for the fun of it”. It was for the fun of numbers — much before the fitness watches, he used to count the number of stairs and steps taken — that Byju first started tutoring students, largely acquaintances and referrals, for Math. “It was a batch of 35 students, purely in an informal setting in Bangalore, learning the shortcuts for CAT preparations,” says Byju, as BW Businessworld met up with the 37-year-old entrepreneur in his business-like office in downtown Bangalore.

The baby steps that led to the eponymous Byju’s Classes, today has grown into a $5.3 billion (Rs 38,000 crore) Byju’s: The Learning App, consolidating its predominant Indian space, and foraying beyond the Indian shores.

According to a KPMG-Google report, the online education space in India will be valued at $1.96 billion by 2021, with 9.5 million users. The primary and secondary supplemented education will be the largest category by 2021 with a size of $773 million, growing at a CAGR of 60 percent. Test preparation, on the other hand, will be the fastest growing category in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 64 percent, and valued at $515 million.