What is Byju’s all about?
It is well known that it is difficult for a single teacher to manage a classroom full of around 40 students with individual attention to every child. The 40 minutes long class is beyond the attention span of an average child. To put an end to this misery, the Byju’s Learning App came into existence.
For kids the most difficult part of the curriculum are maths and science. Mere explanation of these subjects verbally does not do much to get the concepts across, therefore, in the Byju’s learning app, there is an explanation of the subject matter with the help of visualisation tools and videos, tapping into to the imagination of the child, to enhance and promote better understanding of the concepts. Keeping in mind the attention span of an average kid the subject videos are just about 12- 20 mins long.
How Byju’s came into existence?
As the world is moving towards digitisation, there is no way that the Education sector could be left behind. Byju’s is the app that is taking the education sector online. Bringing world-class teaching at the edge of the finger tips. It is currently the world’s most valued education technology company. The company is mostly contained in a mobile application called Byju’s- The learning app. It consists of educational videos for student of class 1 and above, for all the subjects.
The app runs on a freemium model where the content is free for about 15 days and within which students are hooked to the teaching model and to continue. Apart from the school students, Byju’s also provides study content and material for competitive exams like CAT, GMAT, GRE, etc.
About the Founder:
Byju Raveendra the man behind this magnificent business model was born and brought in the humble town of Azhikode in Kannur of Kerala. We can see here that privileges and excuses have never been on his side from the very beginning. He was schooled in a Malayalam medium school. But he had a strong hold on the Maths and science subjects which are not the strong points for most students.
He is a self-taught tutor who believes strongly in self-teaching and says that the Indian education system is ideal to create factory workers, it does not let people think on their feet and does not tap into their curiosity. The Byju’s app does exactly that. It focuses on self-learning and catering to the curiosity of the students. Thereby making learning fun.
Byju Raveendra after finishing his engineering started informally teaching how to crack CAT to his friends while he was still working, which started to grow exponentially, where he was found flying, covering different cities in a span of a day. From just 25 students he moved to taking classes in big auditoriums hosting about 25,000 students. His teaching methods focussed on how to learn over blindly solving thousands of questions. This then finally led to the advent of the business
Investment and Valuation:
Byju’s is one of the startups in India that has immense valuation and in about $5 Billion after it raised its investment from an already existing investor, General Atlantic and Chinese conglomerate Tencent. The edtech company has an annual growth rate of 100% since the start.
Byju’s has acquired another similar platform that focused on math learning called Math Adventures and Byju’s has tied up with Disney for Disney-Byju’s early learning collaboration.
Byju has raised $795.5 million over 9 rounds so far by Aarian Capital, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Naspers, Sofina, Sequoia Capital
The Journey so far:
In a country that is so focussed on getting into the top IIMs and carrying the prestigious IIM tag for the rest of the life, it seldom so happens that one is interested more in the process of joining IIMs over the IIM tag itself, and this rare man is the founder of one of the top funded companies- Byju’s the learning app.
In contradiction to the current scenario where the top companies are relying heavily on discounts and digital marketing to lure targeted audience, Byju’s came into existence purely on the basis of word of mouth. He informally taught his friends how to crack CAT- one of the most difficult exams that is the sole entry level to the prestigious world of MBA in the glorious IIMs, while he himself scored a perfect 100%, attended the college interviews, cleared them all yet choose to pursue his passion to teach CAT over join the dream college and end up in an extremely high paying job.
He started Byju’s with a noble intent and to bring a fresh perspective to the already existing education system that is designed to create more followers that leaders. Due to the visualization method of learning Byju was first established in 2011 as Think and Learn. Ltd and quickly moved from offline to online mode through the Byju’s learning app. The company that started from one city has now taken the app to all around the country and is also looking into international expansions.
Obstacles faced and overcome:
Byju Raveendra himself being from a Malayalam medium school, spoke really fast in the English language because he learnt his English from listening to sports commentaries. Yet this did not stop him from living his dreams and inducing creativity to learning.
The first minor challenge faced by Byju’s learning app was the inability to make the sessions interactive, even when the platform was offline, catering to the doubts of 25,000 student was a very time-consuming fleet. So, the company had to understand and predict the probable doubts of the student and have that pre-devised in their curriculum. That is how they chose to solve that problem.
Expansions and future plans
Currently available in India to a million student to study and learn the concepts through the Byju’s App is now planning to expand globally as they try to understand and analyse the impact of global expansion. The country’s in their immediate vision are UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.
Impact on the society
Students all over the country have access to the Byju’s App through which they can enhance their learning, understanding and creative capacities. Instead of the normal passive learning system that existed. This way learning becomes more enjoyable.
