Byju’s, founded in 2011 and the brainchild of engineer turned tech-billionaire entrepreneur Byju Raveendran, has become one of the most worthwhile companies in India and is the highest valued start-up in India. According to Forbes, Byju Raveendran is now one of India’s youngest billionaires with a net worth of $3.05 billion.

Like every start-up, Byju’s started small, and its “BYJU’s-The Learning App” was launched in 2015. Since then, it has evolved into a powerful online training platform with comprehensive training and coaching platform for multiple exams. Today, Byju’s provides online learning classes for kindergarten to Class 12 students and training for entrance tests to engineering colleges, medical colleges and civil services.

According to a recent report titled “EdTech in India” by Omidyar Network India and RedSeer Consulting, the hitherto untapped market of edtech, joint with the rapid growth in internet access, awareness and digitisation of primary education, is driving the growth of education technology in India.

Much to the likes of Byju’s acquisition haul, Unacademy is not behind. Between March 2020 till February 2021, Unacademy has made 7 acquisitions and with the recent live game streaming platform Rheo TV, the count becomes 8. 

The deal involves a 100 percent stake of Unacademy in Rheo TV and therefore will enable the exit of its previous investors. The investor list includes names such as Lightspeed India Partners, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, AET Fund, founder and former CEO of RedBus Phanindra Sama and former country head of Google Mobile Mahesh Narayanan.

The online live gaming streaming platform Rheo TV – a brainchild of Ex-Unacademy colleagues Saksham Keshri and Prakash Kumar, will now join Unacademy’s Relevel – a platform that aims to bring disruptions in India’s job market. Relevel will up the employability skills of the Indian job seekers by allowing them to showcase their skills through tests and secure employment in various companies. 

Why is Unacademy making such speedy acquisitions?

In 16 months, the acquisitions made by Unacademy ranged from small-medium-sized edtech startups that served the competitive entrance segment such as UPSC, NEET, GATE, ESE and other government exams. The deals taking place at a faster pace also come to the close of the heels of Byjus acquiring India’s largest offline tutorial chain Aakash Educational Services to offer omnichannel learning solutions and become a pioneer in the test prep market. Its partnership with Disney to provide online learning solutions to kindergarten kids and the recent first-ever foreign haul with Osmo – A US-based educational game system, reveals Byju’s ambitious global dreams. 

Looking at these deals, it became imperative for Unacademy to strengthen its anchor in India’s competitive exam segment. 

EdTech Market

The study by venture capital firm Blinc Invest shows that the early childhood care and education sector is booming slowly. It has shown a CAGR of 17% over the last 10 years. With the increase in the usage of gadgets and electronics in our day-to-day lives, the teaching-learning process has taken a modern route.

The Indian education system was estimated at $91.7 billion in 2018. According to KPMG and Google reports, the Indian EdTech market will touch $1.96 billion by 2021. As the K-12 segment continues to grow with innovative start-ups, new companies are emerging in the early learning and childhood education sector as well.

List of EdTech Apps for Kids and What are they Providing?

The EdTech start-ups are covering a wide range of academic as well as social and emotional learning for kids. As childhood, between the ages of 5 and 12, is an active phase of the growth cycle among the kids. The start-ups therefore focus on the overall development and focus on the playful learning model.

DragonBox:

A math learning platform for kids between age 4 to 9 and above. With a gamified learning approach, the app ensures that the kids are engaged throughout their learning process. The app offers different games explaining other topics and making it easier for kids to learn the numbers and linear equations.

Emotix:

Founded by IIT post-graduates, the app created an artificial intelligence-based companion robot- Miko. This robot is capable of educating, entertaining, and engaging children in a playful learning environment. The speciality of this app is that using this robotic technology, it imparts knowledge based on curriculum and talks about interesting facts about the world.

The legacy players in the online education market who have been in the business since before ed-tech became a hot sector are now market leaders. The start-up is one among those players who are on their way to conquering the globe in their ambitious market plans. 

Who is Simplilearn?

Simplilearn is an ed-tech start-up headquartered in Bengaluru and is a veteran start-up in India’s online higher education sector. Founded in the year 2010, they are a market leader in its league and provides differentiated offerings in the digital skilling space. They provide training in disciplines like Cyber Security, Cloud Computing, Project Management, Digital Marketing, Data Science, etc. 

Simplilearn’s Online boot camp

Simplilearn provides an online ed-tech boot camp by partnering with world leading universities and companies. Through the boot camp, they provide post-graduate and master’s programs as well as certification courses for consumers. The bootcamp is mainly aimed at offering digital skills training. 

Simplilearn’s Global Expansion Plans

Simplilearn’s Global Expansion plans come on the heels of their recent investment received by Blackstone, a Private Equity Firm who purchased a majority stake in exchange for $250 M. Simplilearn will take advantage of Black Stone’s global network to fuel its expansion plans. Blackstone’s global expertise in education technology will act as a stepping stone for Simplilearn to go global. 

Products going global

With the new funds in place, Simplilearn plans to reinvent the company as the ‘world’s largest digital skilling company’. By leveraging Blackstone’s global footprint, Simplilearn will launch new programmes and build better ed-tech products. 

Markets being targeted 

Simplilearn will first target the US and European markets as part of their global expansion. They will double down on their primary markets US and India. They will also be expanding to Latin America. 

Partnership with global universities

The company will partner with global businesses and universities through Blackstone’s value-add to the firm and their scale. Empowered by the partnerships, Simplilearn will continue its expansion plans across the world.

Since last year, the pandemic has put a screeching halt to coaching centres, and private tuitions. The prolonged closure of tuition has become a matter of concern for the traditional private tutors as the revenue streams have tightened. Besides low income, another worry for tutors is how the current situation is compelling the entire offline learning landscape to turn online, which is alien for them. 

As the infections continue to rise, there is no certainty regarding the reopening of private tuitions, till then online seems to be the only medium for them to sustain. 

To bridge this gap between online teaching and traditional private tutors, Teachmint -a SaaS-based mobile and video-first teaching platform founded in 2020 is digitising the private tutoring industry in India with its live tutoring app. 

Within a short span of its launch, the startup has been able to amass over 1 million teachers from over 5,000 Indian cities with its usage growing more than 100 percent each month. The success of its innovative virtual learning solutions is attracting investors for its expansion interests. 

Teachmint’s Plan of Expansion with the Recently Raised Funds 

Recently, Teachmint has raised $20 million in a pre-Series B round led by Learn Capital with participation from CM Ventures, right after receiving Series-A fundraise in May worth $16.5 million.  

The freshly infused funds by Teachmint will be utilised to expand its product offerings, hire talent and tap the international markets. 

To cater to educational institutes Teachmint has launched its new product Teachmint for Institute that will empower educational institutes to conduct and monitor all their online classes and institute activities. The platform will enable educational institutes to collect fees, record and store lectures, automatically take attendance, and have a look at the performance assessments.

Cuemath, an EdTech start-up offers a math learning platform with an after-school math and learning programme for the K-12 class. Founded in 2013, Cuemath has a global presence in 20 countries including India, the US, UK, Europe, parts of the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. A purely math focused ed-tech company, Cuemath is headquartered in India but has a major global presence. Cuemath’s user base currently stands at over 2 Lakh+ global students and more than 10000 teachers.

Targeting new markets – Opportunities awaiting Cuemath

For FY22, Cuemath has grand plans to expand even further. The start-up is looking to venture into more markets and has set a target for 30 new markets/countries to expand into. By the end of financial year 2021-22, Cuemath wants to get into a total of 50 markets.

Niche global markets

Cuemath hit the nail on the head in ed-tech. By catering to a niche market (math), they discovered a huge global opportunity. It seems like the whole world will soon be their playground. By positioning themselves as a ‘global math brand’, Cuemath is aiming to build a ‘math platform for the world’.

What’s the Math market like in EdTech?

A pure math market offers massive opportunities in EdTech. It’s estimated to be around $20 B annually and the number of students and teachers waiting to be onboarded is huge, from a global perspective.

Math is one subject that’s a staple for students pursuing all kinds of courses and curriculums. By tapping into this global need, a plethora of markets open up. The Math market is riddled with ed-tech solutions that skim the surface but don’t address the core challenges of students, that is understanding concepts over rote-learning methods.

The covid induced lockdown has revolutionised the chalk-blackboard classroom into a technology-driven one. EdTech companies are increasingly introducing gamification and animation using VR and ML in their learning module to offer a personalised learning experience for the children.

Cartoons and animation have always fascinated young children that kept them glued to the screens. Informative and animated shows like Dora the explorer have successfully cemented loyalty amongst children. 

Anchoring on to animation and cartoons, Prerna Jhunjhunwala the founder of Creative Galileo e-learning has designed an EdTech app- Little Singham for children of age group 3-8 years that combines traditional learning with games, animation, and storytelling to make learning fun and immersive.  Little Singham, launched in 2020, received 1 million downloads within six months of its launch.

What is Little Singham doing Differently in the EdTech Market?

Little Singham is a character-based early learning app for kids that focusses on strengthening the foundation on six major learning pillars namely numeracy, language, social and emotional development, motor skills, creative expression, and discovery of the world. These learning domains have been gamified and are embedded with learning videos, audiobooks, and interactive games. The learning modules of Little Singham consist of engaging story characters like Little Singham and his friends Babli, Lattu, and Hawaldar Karate that create an immersive learning experience. Gamification and animation help children comprehend moral values such as friendship, kindness, and helpfulness easily and that remains etched in their minds for a longer time.

The closed doors of schools in the pandemic are the tailwind behind the EdTech sector and Byjus aspires to become the undisputed leader of it. According to RBSA Advisors Byjus is gearing to become the largest decacorn EdTech start-up worth $30 billion in 10 years. The recent infusion of funds worth $340 million from investors such as the UBS Group, Zoom founder Eric Yuan, Blackstone, Abu Dhabi sovereign fund ADQ, and Phoenix Rising-Beacon Holdings has increased its valuation upto $16.5 billion surpassing Paytm and inching closer to its ambitious plan of raising a total of $ 1.5 billion in 2021. In 2020, Byjus alone raised a lion’s share of $1 billion from the total funding of $2.2 billion in the EdTech sector, as per Venture Intelligence Data. After attracting a huge volume of investments, this begs a question: how is Byjus eyeing to own a larger pie of the EdTech sector?

Acquisitions and the International Market Dream

Byjus online learning quickly shifted its gears from personalised learning to gain foothold in online school classrooms and online tutoring platforms etc. by acquiring Vidyartha, TutorVista, and Edurite. Byjus made these acquisitions keeping in mind to launch new product offerings in online learning solutions to schools through Vidyartha and gain access to the international market leveraging the user base of Tutorvista.

Its acquisition spree did not end there. The year 2020 witnessed the biggest offline tutorial chain Aakash Educational Services getting acquired by Byjus in a deal worth $1billion to strengthen its presence in the engineering and medical entrance exam segment.

WhiteHat Jr an online coding platform for kids is perhaps the first start-up that caught Byjus attention within 20 months of its launch in 2020. The platform will soon launch music, science, and English also creating native courses for the mobile. 70 percent of WhiteHat Jr.’s revenue comes from countries UK and USA. Therefore, holding on to Whitehat Jr expansive reach in international markets, Byjus is launching Byju’s Future School, an online live one-on-one learning platform for coding and mathematics for the USA, UK, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico markets.To tap the kid’s age group of 3-8 years in the US market, Byjus has acquired Osmo – a US-based educational games maker which will offer learning solutions in the US market by leveraging its physical-to-digital technology and content.