Online education giant Byju’s is paying around $ 200 million to acquire the Tynker encryption platform, people familiar with the matter said, as India’s most valuable startup accelerates its expansion ahead of an initial public offering to be launched. wait for next year.
Byju’s is paying for the purchase in cash and stock, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private. The companies did not disclose the value in their statement announcing the deal on Thursday. Byju’s has made nine acquisitions this year as it looks to expand the education options it can offer online.
Tynker’s service, launched in 2013, offers classes and camps on coding, with some curricula offered for free and premium content sold to schools for an average of $ 5,000 a year. Co-founders Krishna Vedati, Srinivas Mandyam and Kelvin Chong will remain in office after the acquisition.
Byju’s, led by former teacher Byju Raveendran, pioneered online education and has seen the sector rise during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many schools closed and parents scrambled to find high-quality options. The startup was valued at $ 16.5 billion with a fundraiser this year, making it the most valuable startup in the country, according to market research firm CB Insights.
In an interview, Raveendran noted that computer science and programming are increasingly seen as essential skills for children leaving school. Silicon Valley-based Tynker will complement Whitehat Jr., a Mumbai-based coding startup that Byju acquired last year.
“Coding is a very important future skill and we hope to accelerate very quickly in the online coding class segment,” Raveendran said in a video interview. “We will spend $ 1 billion in the US edtech market over the next three years on acquisitions and organic growth.”
Vedati said that one in three American schools subscribes to Tynker’s services and that the startup has been profitable for five years.
“The Silicon Valley dream motivates parents to enroll their children in the hope that they will build the next Facebook or Google,” he said. “We have subscribers from every small town in America, including states like South Dakota.”
Byju’s is at the head of a booming class of startups in India, which have benefited from an increase in venture capital funding and went public. Food delivery startup Zomato Ltd. went public in July to strong investor demand, helping set the stage for what could be a record year for IPOs.
The country’s second most valuable startup, digital payments provider Paytm, recently submitted its initial documents for what could be the country’s largest initial public offering to date at $ 2.2 billion. Byju is accelerating plans to go public and aims to file initial IPO documents as early as the second quarter of next year, Bloomberg News reported. The startup and its bankers are discussing a valuation of between $ 40 billion and $ 50 billion, although the final determination will depend on financial results and investor demand, the people said.
The online education startup, formally called Think & Learn Pvt., Has prominent global investors, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Naspers Ltd., Tiger Global Management, and private equity giant Silver Lake Management. .
The company added 45 million students to its platform last year when the pandemic swept through India and said in July that it has more than 100 million users on the app.
Among the company’s other acquisitions are Osmo, a learning system aimed at healthy screen time experiences, and Epic, a digital reading platform.
