PhysicsWallah joins unicorn club with $100 Mn Series A round

Edtech company PW (popularly known as PhysicsWallah) has raised $100 million in Series A funding from Westbridge and GSV Ventures. With this, the firm has become India’s 101st unicorn and the second edtech player to achieve this milestone.

According to PhysicsWalla, this transaction values the company at $1.1 billion post-money. Entrackr was first to report about Physicswallah’s maiden funding round in March with exact details.

The company plans to leverage these funds for business expansion, branding, launching more PW learning centres, and adding new course offerings to its portfolio, said Physicswallah in a release.

Founded in 2016 by Alakh Pandey and later joined by Prateek Maheshwari, Physics Wallah offers online and offline courses and study materials for JEE, NEET and other engineering entrance and state board exams. The platform offers live classes, video lectures, test series and dynamic exercises for the aforementioned exams.

The firm currently has 1,900 employees, including 500 teachers and 90-100 tech experts. It also has 200 associate professors available to answer student queries and another 200 professionals to create exam questions and term papers.

Besides YouTube and applications, PhysicsWallah also runs 20 offline centers across 16 cities such as Delhi, Bhopal, Varanasi, Lucknow, Pune, Patna and Ranchi. Its YouTube channel has close to 7 million subscribers.

Unlike VC funded edtech companies, PhysicsWallah posted profits of Rs 6.92 crore in FY21, according to its annual financial statements. The platform generated Rs 24.6 crore revenue from operations during the financial year and recently claimed that its revenue surged multifold to as much as Rs 350 crore in FY22.

PhysicsWallah has become the second bootstrapped education company to raise a large round from institutional investors in 2022. Earlier this month, Kota-based ALLEN Career Institute scooped up $600 million round from Bodhi Tree Systems. BTS is a newly formed platform between Lupa Systems founder and CEO James Murdoch and Uday Shankar, the former president of The Walt Disney Company Asia Pacific. Entrackr was the first to report about the development in January.