Byju’s raises $250 Mn from existing investors

Edtech giant Byju’s has raised $250 million in a new round from existing investors including Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). This is the second funding round for the Bengaluru-based edtech company in 2022.

The investment comes soon after its annual financial statement for FY21 which showed that its losses shot up nearly 15X whereas revenue barely grew by 4%.

“Byju's is now at that sweet spot of its growth story where the unit economics and the economies of scale both are in its favour. This means the capital that we now invest in our business will result in profitable growth and create sustainable social impact….Continued support from our esteemed investors re-affirms the impact created by us so far, and validates our path to profitability,” Byju Raveendran, co-founder and CEO of Byju’s said.

To turn profitable, Byju’s recently consolidated its K-12 business under one umbrella and also set to lay off 2500 employees. The company also said that it plans to hire 10,000 more teachers in the coming year which would push its educator base to 30,000.

In March, Byju’s said that it raised $800 million including $400 million from Raveendran. Soon after the fundraise, the company announced its foray into offline learning classes and the company has put aside up to $200 million to invest in the new vertical. Unacademy, Vedantu and PhysicsWallah also launched their offline learning classes in 2022.

Despite the pandemic which gave wings to the scale of edtech companies, Byju’s revenue from operations grew only 4% during FY21 to Rs 2,280 crore from Rs 2,189 crore in FY20, as per its annual financial statement with the RoC. However, losses of the company ballooned nearly 15X to Rs 4,564 crore in FY21 from Rs 305 crore in the fiscal year ending March 2020.

As per data compiled by Fintrackr, edtech accounted for more than 30% of overall layoffs in the Indian startup ecosystem in 2022. The list includes Byju’s (Toppr, WhiteHat Jr), Unacademy, Vedantu, LEAD, Eruditus, Invact Metaversity while a clutch of edtech startups such as Lido, Udayy, SuperLearn and Crejo.Fun shut their operations.