Vedantu turns unicorn after a $100 Mn round

Edtech startup Vedantu is the latest to graduate to the coveted unicorn club after the company raised $100 million in a Series E round led by Singapore based ABC World Asia and participated by Coatue, Tiger Global, GGV Capital, Westbridge and others. This is the first capital raise for the company in 2021 and in the past 15 months.

A year ago, the Bengaluru-based startup had raised $100 million in its Series D round at a post-money valuation of over $500 million, according to Fintrackr’s calculation. During its Series D round, three of its co-founders, Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain and Anand Prakash, had sold secondary shares to KB Capital.

Vedantu is the 28th startup to achieve unicorn status in 2021 alone. Earlier this month, professional networking platform for blue and grey collar workers, Apna and e-sports platform Mobile Premier League had joined the club after the likes of Zetwerk, Grofers, Eruditus, CoinDCX, upGrad, MindTickle and BharatPe had raised their fresh rounds at unicorn valuation last month.

Used car marketplace Spinny is also set to soon join the unicorn club as it is in late-stage talks to mop up $250-300 million at a $1.9 billion valuation, Entrackr had exclusively reported.

Vedantu’s core offering covers online classes from grade 6 to 12 along with materials from grade 1 to 12 and JEE. The company ventured into kids coding space (age bracket 6-12) in May 2020. The company was also in talks to consolidate with Byju’s, however, the company denied it.

The edtech space has seen considerable consolidation this year, led by acquisition sprees by the likes of Byju’s and Unacademy, two of the biggest startups in this space. Like them, Vedantu had also acquired Instasolv and Pedagogy. 

Vedantu is yet to file its annual financial report for FY21. However, its losses in FY20 had widened to Rs 158.5 crore, against Rs 27 crore in FY19. According to Fintrackr, its total revenues for the fiscal ending March 2020 stood at Rs 35.8 crore against Rs 12.4 crore in FY19.

While the current shareholding structure of Vedantu is unknown, Accel was the biggest stakeholder in the company followed by Omidyar and Tiger after the completion of the Series D round. According to Fintrackr, Chinese education major TAL Learning was also a significant stakeholder in Vedantu. Importantly, the three co-founders’ collective holding stood at 7.62% collectively at that time.