Online education provider Byju's acquired TutorVista and Edurite from British publishing firm Pearson as it pushes its international expansion.
Founded by Krishnan Ganesh and his wife Meena Ganesh in 2005, TutorVista is an online learning platform for school and college students and counts the U.S. as its largest market. Edurite, which provides education course material in worksheets and video CDs, was acquired by TutorVista in 2007. Pearson bought the combined entity in 2011.
“This partnership will enhance our product offerings and give us access in some of the new markets when we launch our international products,” Byju Raveendran, founder and chief executive officer of Byju's, said in a media statement on Monday. When contacted by BloombergQuint over the phone, the company declined to disclose financial details of the deal.
Byju's, recently valued at $700 million according to Bloomberg, is also the only startup in Asia to be backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a personal fund set up by Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Other big investors include Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sofina.
The company last raised $15 million from World Bank's arm International Finance Corp in December.
Byju's app has been been downloaded more than 8 million times and over 4 lakh students pay an annual fee of Rs 10,000 (just over $150). The app adds 1,000 subscribers every day and has an annual renewal rate of 90 percent. India's online education industry is projected to grow five-fold to 9.6 million paid users by 2021, according to the Google KPMG Online Education in India report released in May this year.
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