Edtech company BYJU's is in talks to acquire live online learning platform Vedantu, Entracker reported on August 6 citing two sources. The acquisition will be made for around $600-$700 million, the report added.
However, Vedantu CEO’s Vamsi Krishna has said that it is "completely false and no such discussions have taken place."
"Having a significant purpose and meaning is of the most precious things in life, Vedantu is that meaning for us. This is not only our dream but a dream every Vedan lives by. It’s way too precious to be sold or given away," he added.
Founded by Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Anand Prakash and Saurabh Saxena in 2011, Vedantu currently provides live coaching classes for K12 students, including for entrance exams such as IIT JEE Main and Advanced for engineering and NEET for medical colleges.
It provides classes for CBSE and ICSE, as well as various state boards, along with sample question papers, revision notes, mock tests and previous year’s papers. Vedantu said it has 27 million monthly visitors on its website and 68 million monthly views on YouTube. Many of these customers use Vedantu’s products for free but the scale indicates its growing popularity. It has 200,000 paid subscribers- which has grown by four times in the last one year.
BYJU’s on July 25 announced it had acquired after-school learning app Toppr and upskilling platform Great Learning, in a cash and stock deal. This will be the seventh startup that will be acquired by BYJU's if the Vedantu deal goes through.
Until now, BYJU's has already spent over $2.2 billion in acquiring complementary businesses in 2021 alone. With the Great Learning's acquisition, BYJU's would now enter the upskilling and reskilling segment.
A week after the acquisition of Toppr, BYJU's had announced $500 million to acquire US-based Epic -- an online reading platform for kids -- by continuing its spree of large acquisitions to expand its education services beyond the Indian market and across categories.
BYJU’s said it will invest a billion dollars in North America and considers the region one of its most lucrative markets. This is not BYJU’s first foray into the US. In 2019, it acquired educational games-maker Osmo, another US-based firm for $120 million.
Last year, BYJU’s also acquired coding startup WhiteHat Jr., which also considers the US a key market. BYJU’s last month launched Future School, an online one-on-one live learning platform for math and coding.
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