India’s top e-learning startup Byju's is targetting almost 270% jump in revenues at Rs 1,400 crore in the current fiscal 2018-19.
Last financial year, the company, which is backed by top foreign equity funds, had clocked a turnover of Rs 520 crore.
To date, Byju’s e-learning app has logged 30 million downloads, of which almost 2 million are paid subscribers, company’s chief operating officer (COO) Mrinal Mohit told Business Standard here.
“Currently, our monthly app downloads range between 1.2 and 1.5 million with a conversion rate of 5-7%. Considering that 75% of downloads are coming from smaller towns compared to the metros and big cities, we are catering to a much larger base now,” he added.
Meanwhile, Byju’s today formally launched its e-learning programs in Hindi, which is targetted at almost 44% of the Hindi speaking population in India spread over major Hindi speaking states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan.
Now, Byju’s e-learning materials are available in English and Hindi. However, within the next 12 months, the company plans to launch its offerings in all major Indian languages, including Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu etc.
At present, the company is catering various academic boards, including state boards, with regards to physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology subject for standards IV to XII. In coming months, Byju’s would add curriculum for social studies and English language as well, he informed. The Bengaluru-based company has a 1,700 member content generation team.
“The student pool that we cater to is estimated at 300 million, of which half or 150 million are our prospective user base, which is a huge market,” he said adding that there was a conversion of 6% Hindi speaking students to English every year in India.
With over 3.3 million students, UP ranks amongst the fastest growing regions for Byju’s, he said adding smaller districts like Barabanki, Azamgarh and Saharanpur were showing higher adoption as compared to top performing cities like Kanpur, Lucknow and Allahabad in recent months.
He claimed Byju’s student base in UP had more than doubled in the past year and the state was expected to be one of the fastest adopters of this feature.
In its initial days, the company had received funding from Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic arm of Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. So far, it has raised funds from CZI, Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings etc.
In recent months, Byju’s raised about US$ 400 million from Canada’s CPP Investment Board, Naspers Ventures, General Atlantic and a few existing investors. The company was valued at US$ 4 billion, thus ranking the company among the top domestic startups viz. Ola, Oyo Rooms, Paytm etc.
In June 2018, the company had attained Rs 100 crore in the monthly revenues after expanding its foothold in the smaller towns.