Indian edtech and BYJU'S: Lessons learnt and the road ahead

Byju Raveendran is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of the world’s leading edtech company and India’s most valuable startup, BYJU’S, which he co-founded with Divya Gokulnath in 2011. A teacher turned entrepreneur, his vision is to bring high-quality, accessible, and personalized education to millions of students around the world. As a first-generation entrepreneur who has risen from the grassroots, Byju is also one of India’s biggest philanthropists in the field of education.

Byju was born to teacher parents in Azhikode, a village in Kerala, off the western coast of India. He studied in a Malayalam-medium government school where his mother taught physics and his father taught mathematics. A prodigiously precocious child, he developed different learning methods on his own to understand academic concepts better and faster. He would often miss his school classes for sports but make up for that by self-learning science and mathematics. This served him well later while designing personalized and adaptive learning programs for his eponymous learning app.

Byju had been working as a globetrotting engineer with a multinational shipping company in Singapore when he started teaching his friends some math concepts while on a holiday back home in India. His tryst with teaching started when he helped a few of his friends write some of the toughest competitive exams in the country including the Common Admission Test (CAT). The classrooms grew exponentially based on the outstanding word-of-mouth publicity around his unique teaching style, he started an education company - BYJU’S Classes - to increase his reach and impact. The largest classroom session Byju ever conducted was for 25,000 students simultaneously at an indoor stadium in Delhi in 2011. It was in the same year that he started shifting from an offline format to video to quickly scale up across India.

In 2011, the company was incorporated as Think and Learn Pvt Ltd., focussed on students in the K-12 space. The name of the company, which would later become parent to the BYJU’S brand name, reflects his conviction that learning should always be fun and never rote-based. The companylaunched BYJU’S - the learning app - in 2015 as internet trends like mobility, video and cloud converged in the background. With “movie-like videos” and “game-like interactions”, the app uses media and technology as enablers of continuous and personalized learning. The company has 150 million students on its various apps, platforms and programs till date

To grow BYJU’S across the world, Byju Raveendran has so far raised nearly $6 billion in capital from more than 70 global investors including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Naspers Ltd., Tiger Global Management, and Sequoia Capital India. Byju has a significant stake in BYJU'S. He invested $400 million in BYJU’S in March 2022 in his personal capacity to further increase his stake in the company and put “more skin in the game”. BYJU’S is currently valued at $22 billion.

Byju Raveendran has spearheaded some of the biggest acquisitions in India’s education and technology spaces. BYJU’S parent Think and Learn acquired India’s largest test prep company Aakash Educational Services in April 2021, Singapore-based upskilling firm Great Learning in July 2021 and Austrian Math-learning app GeoGebra in December 2021. He led the entry of BYJU’S in North America through several strategic acquisitions, including that of Osmo, Epic, and Tynker. Under his leadership, BYJU’S has also expanded its product portfolio to include one-on-one learning for school children across the world, including US, UK, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Australia.

Byju& Divya launched a not-for-profit social initiative in 2020 under the umbrella of BYJU’S Education for All (EFA). BYJU’S EFA solves for the shortages of device, internet access and quality educational content in India’s underserved communities. The initial goal was to reach 5 million students by 2025 but that target was reached three years in advance. The strong uptake has now pushed up the target to 10 million students by 2025. In November 2022, BYJU’S unveiled Lionel Messi as the global brand ambassador for BYJU’S Education for All.

Byju Raveendran has received multiple awards for disrupting education around the world through the use of technology. He is the recipient of the Forbes India Entrepreneur of the Year 2021, Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2018 (startup) and 2020 (overall), the IMPACT Person of the Year 2019, Fortune 40 under 40 and Manorama Newsmaker of the Year 2020.

Byju is married to Divya Gokulnath, and they are parents to two sons, Nish and Nivin. He always acknowledges his parents role in supporting him is his journey as a teacher and an entrepreneur. He considers his father as his role model for giving him complete freedom to pursue his twin passions of sports and mathematics.

Byju is an avid sportsperson. He plays cricket, tennis, table tennis and football at an expert level. He has learnt most of his life and business skills through sports. It was his passion for both business and sports that saw his company, BYJU’S, sponsor the men’s and women’s national cricket teams of India. In March, 2022 BYJU’S was declared the official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.