We Are Only Looking At An IPO In The Next 15-18 Months

In just a decade, Byju Raveendran, Co-founder of Byju’s, has turned a fledgling math tutorial outfit into the world’s largest ed-tech venture and India’s biggest unicorn, valued at $16.5 billion.

- Udayan Mukherjee

Not the one to rest on his laurels, this sport fanatic upped his game during the pandemic, raising and spending billions of dollars in a flurry of acquisitions that has put Byju’s on track to become a highly profitable, $5-billion revenue company by 2023-2024. This could make it one of India’s five most valuable companies, and him one of the country’s richest business founders. Raveendran talks to BT’s Global Business Editor Udayan Mukherjee about Byju’s explosive growth, the future of ed-tech, and more. Edited excerpts:

UM: You started Byju’s barely a decade ago, and it is already valued more than some of India’s oldest and biggest companies such as IndianOil or Bajaj Auto. Did you ever imagine that Byju’s would become so big in such a short span of time?

BR: To be honest, I didn’t start Byju’s as a business. I was only following my passion. Slowly, it moved from a class of 30 students to auditoriums, then stadiums and, finally, to millions of smartphones. I am still in pursuit of how to make it better and bigger.

UM: From a tutorial teacher to grappling with deals running into hundreds of millions of dollars…do these valuations strike you as a bit of a bubble?

BR: I think it is very early days for our sector and what technology can do for it. This is one of the last sectors technology is going to disrupt. It took a pandemic for a lot of people to realise the benefits of online education. There are many things which can be done better online, though there are areas where offline is better.