With this, Vedantu’s valuation rose to $1 billion from around $600 million last year, when it raised $100 million from Kotyu. This makes Vedantu the 28th Indian unicorn so far this year, joining the likes of Byju’s, Unacademy, Eruditus and Upgrade in the prestigious club. Temasek recently led funding rounds at both Unacademy as well as Upgrade.
Vedantu said that the round is not closed yet and more investors are expected to join in the coming phases. According to sources familiar with the matter, another $10-20 million could be added in the current round at the same valuation.
The Bengaluru-based online tutoring platform offers individual and group classes in the K-12 and test preparation segments. It provides classes for CBSE, ICSE as well as state board students.
Vedantu is expected to use the new capital to double its core business as well as expand overseas and add local languages to its coaching. It also plans to add tutoring solutions for grades 1-5 going forward, CEO Vamsi Krishna said.
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“Local languages are going to be a big focus for us in the next two years. We are also seriously looking at international expansion in the next 15 months. We are looking at Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as well as geographies like Southeast Asian markets, Europe and others,” Krishna told ET.
It has more than 35 million students access to its platform and it expects about half a million students to be paid this academic year. In the last academic year, it had about 200,000 paid users, which was a threefold increase, he said.
“We have grown two-three times in metrics. We are currently at a $65 million annual revenue run-rate which is three times higher than last year,” Krishna said.
Founder of Vedantu
Comeback Kid Award Winners At ET Startup Awards 2020.
Acquisitions and Consolidation
Vedantu will rely on both organic and inorganic routes for its planned expansion. It will also use the new capital to strengthen operations such as product engineering and others.
Under Byju’s leadership, the sector has seen massive consolidation over the past six months with several M&As. ET reported that Byju’s has spent over $2 billion on major acquisitions such as Aakash Institute, Great Learning and others. Unacademy is also looking for deals.
In July, Vedantu announced that it had acquired a majority stake in AI-enabled personal learning platform Pedagogy, but did not disclose the financial terms of the investment. Before that in February,
Vedantu also acquired doubt-resolving app Instasolve in its first acquisition. The deal added nearly one million potential learners from Instasolve to the Vedantu platform.
“Vedantu’s innovative platform empowers teachers who have delivered outstanding results to deliver personalized education to multiple students at once, creating the potential for massive impact. We are pleased to partner with Vamsi and the Vedantu team as they continue to measure and shape learning outcomes for students in India,” said Sugandhi Matta, Chief Impact Officer, ABC World Asia.