Byju’s, the world’s most-valued online tutoring startup operated by Think and Learn Pvt Ltd, has made forays into offline tuition classes with the launch of ‘Byju’s Tuition Centre,’ the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The edtech startup will be investing as much as $200 million to operate and expand Byju’s Tuition Centre over the next 12 to 18 months, Mrinal Mohit, Chief Operating Officer, Byju’s told VCCircle in a virtual interaction. The company hopes to enroll one million students into the programme over the next two years, and launch 500 such tuition centres across 200 cities this year. Byju hopes to thus create over 10,000 jobs across the country with Byju’s Tuition Centre.
According to Mohit, the tuition centres will be leased and developed by Byju’s and have technology-enabled features. Each tuition centre will have the capacity to accommodate around 2,000 to 4,000 students, Mohit said.
The company recently hired Himanshu Bajaj, former head of Asia Consumer and Retail Practice at Kearney, a global consultancy firm, to lead Byju’s Tuition Centre. Mohit said the company had launched a pilot programme last year by opening 80 centres across the country, to which it received strong feedback.
Byju’s will be leveraging the technology infrastructure of many companies, which it has acquired to date, according to Mohit. Byju’s acquired 10 companies since 2020, including Aakash Educational Services, its biggest acquisition till date. Byju’s acquired Aakash in April last year for nearly $1 billion.
“We acquired a company last year that specializes in digitizing subjective assessment. For an MCQ test, it is easy to give feedback, but school exams are subjective. So, we will be using their technology to give feedback to students. Another example is of Osmo, a Palo Alto-based company, which we had acquired. They specialize in vision technology, and we will be using that. We will also be using Aakash’s expertise in starting these 500 centres,” Mohit said.
However, Mohit clarified that Byju’s will not be leveraging any of Aakash’s existing physical centres for Byju’s tuition classes as of now.
To be sure, Byju’s offline and hybrid forays follow Aakash Educational Services’ plans of adding more physical centres in 2022. VCCircle reported on Tuesday that the Byju’s-owned company plans on adding at least 75 more centres this year. Aakash also claimed it has not given up any of its physical centres since 2020, when the first lockdown was announced in the wake of the pandemic.
Aakash Chaudhry, Aakash Educational Services’ Chief Executive said the company was expecting a strong bounce back in demand for offline classes as it was witnessing willingness from many students to attend physical classes. Mohit, corroborating Chaudhry, said that Byju’s was witnessing a need for hybrid coaching post the pandemic, which led the company to start Byju’s Tuition Centre.
“There are some students who need online support and the scheduled support. There are some students who need physical intervention. So, a child who needs physical intervention will need physical intervention and hence as an organization dedicated to learning our duty is to come up with products which suit other students. There is a set of consumers and we are now deciding to actually go after,” said Mohit.
