Byju's journey - From India's most funded ed-tech startup to a Harvard case study

With over a 25,000 crowd, Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium is echoing with applause. However, there is no game that the crowd is cheering for at this stadium. Instead, they are cheering on new ways to solve algebra that is being taught by Bangalore-based startup Byju’s. On display are huge screens cutting and slicing geometrical shapes on a man's command who has taken the ed-tech scene in India by storm.

The phenomenon is repeated across other cities such as Chennai, Mumbai and even in places such as Dubai and Qatar, where indoor stadiums are being booked by Sequoia Capital-backed Byju’s to conduct mass classes for maths!

Byju’s principle goes back to the basics. Breaking tough equations into diagrams, words, numbers or variables - just four possible ways to derive an answer to any question.

Did you know that a quadratic equation can be taught in the form of a story visual? We learnt to solve the factorization of a basic quadratic polynomial through squares and rectangles.

It’s this method of teaching that has led investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, IFC and Innoven Capital to back the company with over USD 200 million in last four years, the highest ever by an ed-tech startup in India.

At the company’s headquarters in a glass building in Bangalore, about 500 people are employed to discover innovative ways subjects can be taught to kids from class 6-10, and even to adults preparing for civil services, JEE or CAT entrance exams.

Meet the CAT addicts

We decide to speak to two of Byju’s students who are now driving the company’s overall global strategy, as Byju is travelling. They recount how they became addicted to maths.

It was the year 2008-09 and it was only three weeks to CAT, the entrance test to India’s biggest management institutes – the IIM’s. Fed up of working in tech divisions of large IT firms, Pravin Prakash thought that cracking the CAT will be his ticket to a new career in management. But he flunked the exam thrice. For the fourth attempt, just two weeks prior to CAT, he followed his hunch to fly down from Mumbai to Bangalore to attend a 45-minute workshop in by a 'bicep bulging, young math teacher' named Byju Raveendran.

Two weeks after, he passed the CAT with a 99.9 percentile and got calls from almost all the IIMs. But he did not join any. He decided to join his teacher, who also had cleared the CAT twice in past and got through all the top IIMs but decided to stick to teaching.

Source: Tracxn

“Having become a CAT addict, I was confident I could clear it again. So I decided to give a year to build the business with him," said Prakash, who has stuck with the company ever since. He is now the CMO at Byju's.

The company which started as Raveendran as the sole employee, conducting workshops across various cities in a week, expanded to other cities with VSAT. The idea to turn it into a large business was germinated by Mrinal Mohit, another former student of Ravindran, who is now serving as the COO at the startup. While Ravindran has always been the face of Byju's, the startup soon realised the importance of content over anything else.

"People get drawn by his teaching style, but really, what they will pay for is the content," Mrinal explains. That's why, a video-based teaching module was best suited, he thought. “Suddenly we were teaching about 20,000 students, much higher than 1,000 students he was teaching,” says Mrinal Mohit, who also cracked CAT but decided to join his teacher.

That’s when Sequoia Capital also decided to invest the first big round of USD 25 million funding, to expand the company in 2013.

From VSAT, the company expanded into video and animation content. And now an app. The students get a 15 day free trial period, after which he or she has to pay about Rs 10,000 to download the course material.

"We don't believe in discounts or keeping the price low just for the sake of it. Our content is good and we ask what it deserves," Mrinal says emphatically.

Maybe that's the reason investors have found an unfailing confidence for the venture. The company now claims to have over 80 lakh downloads of its app with over 4 lakh paid customers. The startup is also being added as part of a business case study at Harvard.

Innovations are constantly being worked on behind closed doors in the media room at the Byju's HQs. Music is playing aloud, while some employees are on headphones, adding music to the course subjects, some teachers are shooting inside the green room. A lot is scribbled on desk workstations - a burgeoning atmosphere for the creatives. Others are experimenting with animations to teach complex subjects.

“We plan to expand into vernacular languages content now. There is a lot of scope to teach students in their native language. We are also developing a pilot project for AI-based learning,” Mrinal says.

So can we see a classroom filled with students wearing VR headsets and learning from virtual teachers in cyber classrooms?

“Yes, why not!” exclaims Mohit.