Westbridge Capital-backed edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah Pvt. Ltd (PW), on Thursday said that it has acquired iNeuron Intelligence Pvt. Ltd to expand its offerings in the upskilling category.
The deal is valued at around Rs 250 crore (about $30.2 million) and will provide an exit to investors including publishing house S Chand & Co.
The iNeuron team will drive the company's tech skilling plan under PW Skills, said Alakh Pandey, cofounder and chief executive, PhysicsWallah. PhysicsWallah currently offers upskilling courses under the PW Skills brand, which includes business analytics programs and computer science languages such as Java and C++.
According to cofounder Prateek Maheshwari, there is a skills gap between what has been taught at institutes and what the industry demands. “We were looking for skilling startups that had strong fundamentals and have actually helped students bag their dream jobs. We saw such capabilities in iNeuron which helped a chef turn into a coder and a UPSC aspirant with a gap of five years land a job at Amazon," Maheshwari said, explaining the thesis for the acquisition.
Launched in 2020, PhysicsWallah (PW) helps students prepare for engineering and medical entrance examinations. Founded by Pandey and Maheshwari, PW specialises in giving lectures and sessions on YouTube, the PW app, and the website for students aspiring for entrance exams such as Neet and JEE Mains. It turned unicorn early this year after it raised $100 million (around Rs 777 crore) in its Series A funding round from marquee investors Westbridge and GSV Ventures.
Meanwhile, listed publishing and education services firm S Chand said in an exchange filing that it sold its entire stake (6.05%) in the upskilling platform for Rs 14 crore (around $1.7 million). This is the second recent exit for S Chand from its various edtech investments. In July, the company sold its stake in exam preparation platform Testbook and made an over 8x return.
S Chand's stock slid 1.32% to close at Rs 164.65 apiece on BSE on Thursday.
S Chand along with its wholly owned subsidiaries Vikas Publishing and Chhaya Prakashani had acquired a minority stake in iNeuron Intelligence in December 2021. In addition, S Chand’s co-investor, Mukesh Sharma Family Trust, would also be exiting its investment in Bengaluru-headquartered iNeuron Intelligence.