Meet Byju, who’s changing the way India learns

Byju Raveendran spent the winter of 2005 musing over the promises and perils of entrepreneurship. It was a stable, comfortable time for him. His job as a service engineer at Pan Ocean Shipping was taking him to distant corners of the world, from the Caribbean islands to Spain and, more importantly, bringing home close to ₹50 lakh a year, no mean sum for a middle-class household in Azhikode, a coastal village in the Kannur district of Kerala (Southern Indian state).

But events had compelled him to ponder the possibilities of a riskier career.

Around August that year, while on a break to meet friends and family in Bengaluru after a 15-month-long voyage, Raveendran—born to school teachers—spent most weekends giving math tuitions to his friends aspiring to crack management entrance tests. He found that, over the next three months, new faces started getting added to his ‘class’. Raveendran went viral on employee forums at technology companies, and chatter around his ability to water down complex mathematical problems to suit anybody’s appetite started getting louder.

That year, Raveendran took the Common Aptitude Test (CAT) “for fun”, scored in the 100th percentile and cleared interviews for the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata. He found himself spoilt for choice. “I could have gone back to the job because I was in love with it. I could join an IIM. I could also scale up the tutorials. They [his students] were giving me so much more importance than what I had ever got,” recalls Raveendran, 38, sitting in the conference room of his eponymous company’s headquarters in Bengaluru. Of the three options, he figured that the job and management degree could wait for a while. The business proposition of tutorials made far more sense to him.

This was a time when the startup wave was yet to hit Indian shores. Venture capital was a novelty. Raveendran quit his job in early 2006 to dive into teaching full-time. The sessions, informally called Byju’s classes, and this time for a fee, migrated from his friend’s drawing room to a 35-seater classroom. Within two months, he was teaching math, data interpretation and logical reasoning for management entrance tests to 1,200 students in an auditorium in Bengaluru.

Over the next decade, his management entrance tutorial metamorphosed into the largest homegrown online education company for K-12 students, Byju’s. Of the approximately $240 million that the company has raised in equity and debt, about $205 million came between March 2016 and July 2017 when most consumer internet startups were heading back to the drawing board to chart out frugal business plans amid a protracted lull in funding. Yet, Byju’s snared funds from Tencent Holdings and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the personal project of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

Raveendran is confident that a global push, sharp focus on the product, deeper penetration into India and a tight grip on spends will make Byju’s a force to reckon with, internationally. That apart, the online education market in India is poised to explode in the next four years. According to a May 2017 report by KPMG and Google, India’s online education market is expected to grow to $1.96 billion and about 9.6 million users by 2021 from $247 million and about 1.6 million users in 2016.