From college dropout to leading unicorn startup: PhysicsWallah CEO Alakh Pandey’s success story

It is Alakh Pandey’s love for teaching that evolved into a successful enterprise.

Edtech startup PhysicaWallah has raised $100 million in Series A Funding, becoming a part of the list of unicorns in India. The company and its CEO Alakh Pandey have had quite a journey.

It is Alakh Pandey’s love for teaching that evolved into a successful enterprise. When he was in school himself, Pandey start tutoring younger students to support his family amid financial difficulties, Twitter user Shreyans Singh, who frequently tweets about startups, wrote in a thread on June 8.

Pandey, who hails from Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, dropped out of college in his third year to teach physics at an institute in Kanpur.

A college dropout from Allahabad built a profitable unicorn startup: Physics Wallah. This is the amazing story of Alakh Pandey pic.twitter.com/H3iagIoC46

— Shreyans Singh (@shreyans512) June 8, 2022

The students there loved how he taught. The head of the coaching institute advised him to start a YouTube channel so more students could have access to his lessons.

Pandey heeded his advice and launched a channel called PhysicsWallah in 2014.

Read: He rejected an offer from Unacademy and now runs an edtech worth a billion dollars: Meet PhysicsWallah’s Alakh Pandey

Things were slow in the initial years. It was only in 2017, when Pandey quit his coaching job to focus on YouTube full time, that the channel picked up. By 2019, he had 2 million subscribers.

In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hit. As teaching and learning moved online, demand for Pandey’s content grew.

He started the PhysicsWallah app that year. For an edge over established platforms like Byju’s and Unacademy, he sold his courses starting at just Rs 999.

In an attempt to end the competition, Unacademy offered to hire Pandey on a huge salary package but he refused. The company also poached PhysicsWallah teachers, Singh wrote.

Even as his staff dwindled, Pandey did not give up on his vision of affordable coaching, as is evident from his startup’s success story today.

“Today, PhysicsWallah is an edtech giant with 6 million students, 1500 employees, 350 crore revenue, and it’s profitable,” Singh wrote.

With its $100 million funding, PhysicsWallah plans to grow even more.

“PW (PhysicsWallah) will be utilizing these funds for business expansion, branding, opening more PW offline centers, and introducing courses in other vernacular languages,” Pandey has said.