Edtech firm Byju's is close to raising around $600-700 million from new and existing investors in fresh funding round. The deal is estimated to lift the Bengaluru-based company's valuation to about $15 billion from $12 billion.
The funds will be used to buy Aakash Educational Services, a company that runs a chain of brick-and-mortar test preparation coaching centres, Entracker reported.
Read | Small-town dreams to $1 billion valuation: How Aakash Educational Services grew wings
"The new investors joining the round are from the Middle East and the US. Existing investors would also participate in the round that would majorly be used to finance acquisitions of Aakash Educational Services,” sources told the portal.
While the deal is yet to be announced, it was reported in January that Byju's will acquire Aakash Educational Services for $1 billion.
The acquisition is likely to materialise over the next few weeks, the report said.
Moneycontrol could not independently verify the report.
This is the first financing round for Byju's in 2021. The company was on a fundraising spree in 2020, raising over $1 billion in a year.
Aakash Educational Services would be the third major acquisition by Byju’s in the past two years. In 2019, it acquired US-based Osmo for $120 million. In August 2020, Byju's acquired WhiteHat Jr, another start-up in the ed-tech space focused on online coding classes for kids.
The company founded by Byju Raveendran has raised about $2.1 billion from investors so far. India's second most valuable start-up is backed by Mark Zuckerberg's Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Tiger Global Management, and Bond Capital, co-founded by Silicon Valley investor Mary Meeker.
Bjyu's caters to over 70 million users in more than 1,700 cities in India, creating educational content for students from kindergarten to the 12th grade. It claims to be adding more than 5 million users a month.
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