Zuckerberg-backed Byju’s looking at Rs 600 crore revenues in FY18

India’s largest e-learning company Byju’s, funded by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg apart from other top foreign equity funds, is looking at revenues of almost Rs 600 crore in current 2017-18 fiscal.

“The revenues of Rs 600 crore would be a growth of about 100 percent over last year,” Byju’s COO Mrinal Mohit said here.

Besides, the company is expanding its wings and gearing up to cover learning material for the state level educational boards as well. Thus far, the company only offered study material for national boards viz. ICSE and CBSE for classes 4 to 12.

“We are in the process of developing course material for six state boards, including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and West Bengal, which would be available in the next 6-9 months,” Mohit told Business Standard.

Launched in 2011, Byju’s offers visual and text based study content for school students as well as those preparing for different competitive exams. In 2015, the company launched Byju’s mobile app, which became popular clocking 10 million users and 5,00,000 annual paid subscriptions. Annual renewal rates are pegged at almost 90%.

Earlier, the company had received funding from Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic arm of Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. In fact, it was the first funding by CZI in any Asian company. In all, the company has so far raised about 200 million dollars from different investors, including CZI, Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings etc.

Meanwhile, Byju’s is also expanding its network of Student Connect Centres, which are designed as contact hubs for the students and parents to understand the concept of its learning programmes, including mobile app.

The company has launched 15 such centres in India, including Lucknow. With over 1.2 million students, UP is one of the fastest growing regions in North India for Byju’s. Interestingly, smaller districts like Etawah, Ballia and Shamli are showing higher adoption rate as compared to top performing cities like Lucknow, Allahabad and Ghaziabad, Mohit informed.

“We are planning to open 10 more such centres in UP in the next 12 months to cover all the major towns,” he added.