Byju’s, the Bangalore-based edtech platform, has managed to raise funds to the tune of $200 mn in a fresh round of funding, which saw participation by BlackRock, T Rowe Price and other private investors. While the former is one of the existing investors, the latter is a new investor.
It was only about two months ago that Byju’s had managed to raise $500 million in a financing round. In about 18 rounds of funding, it has managed to raise capital to the tune of $2.3 billion. Not surprisingly, the Company is now valued at $12 billion.
The pandemic that caused schools to shut down and move their classrooms online, worked in favour of Byju’s. With education becoming ‘remote’ and shifting online, investments in the Company increased almost four times, with $1.5 billion coming in in the first nine months of this year, whereas in the entire year of 2019, only $409 million had come in.
Its acquisition of WhiteHate Jr, the code-learning startup, for $300 million, had made headlines earlier this year.
These funds will help the Company in the future when it goes for acquisitions. Today, the app has about 70 million registered students and 4.5 million paid subscribers.
Its revenues have doubled from $189 million in the financial year ending March 2019 to $378million in the financial year ending March 2020.
In October, the educational technology and online tutoring company had found a place in the list of companies that had expanded their ESOP pool. Byju’s had added a few hundred million dollars to its ESOP pool as a reward for exemplary performance