SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — BYJU, an educational app for Indian schoolchildren, has set its sights on revolutionizing learning formats and products after raising $75 million from Sequoia India and Sofina.
The company, founded as an online education platform in 2001, has now raised a total of $90 million in funding. BYJU launched its app just six months ago and claims it has already been downloaded 2.5 million times, and has more than 120,000 paid annual subscribers. Courses on the platform are aimed at students in grades six to 12, and supplements their regular classwork while preparing them for upcoming major exams.
Byju Raveendran, founder and CEO of the company, recently told TechCrunch during a conversation that India possesses the largest K-12 education system in the world, but frequently ranks poorly in worldwide assessments of progress. He opined this is because Indian students lack access to quality educators, and are forced into a “one-size-fits-all approach,” because of the country’s high teacher-student ratio. Students spend too much time “driven by fear of exams rather than the love for learnings,” he added.
Raveendran has spent countless hours working with students, prepping and teaching them for math and entrance exams, with a true passion to transform the nature of learning worldwide. He recognized the catalyst of his mission was taking his platform mobile with the app.
“We have been a very successful offline brand, but last year we launched our first application through a mobile platform, and that has helped us leapfrog to the next level in terms of users,” he said. “We are making an impact where it matters, and how students learn in those crucial years where they start failing (in a) subject, in the 6th or 7th grades. We know we are making a much bigger impact because we are changing the way India is learning today.”
His app is adding nearly 20,000 students each month to its teaching base.
Raveendran’s ultimate goal is to create educational tools for all students, not just the extremely motivated. BYJU’s teaching methods focus on visual learning with diagrams and engaging videos which relay facts contextually so that students can see how they’re relevant to their lives. Along the way, BYJU’s learning platform analyzes how students are performing, providing them with personalized feedback and recommendations as they progress through the coursework.
“The platform adapts to the pace of learning, size of learning, and style of learning, in the sense that a student will know what to learn, when to learn, how much to learn, and how fast to learn,” Raveendran said.
SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — BYJU, an educational app for Indian schoolchildren, has set its sights on revolutionizing learning formats and products after raising $75 million from Sequoia India and Sofina.
