Bengaluru, NFAPost: Online tutoring firm Vedantu raised $100 million in its Series E round of funding at a valuation of $1 billion. The company thus became the fifth edutech company to become other unicorn along with Byju’s, Unacademy, Eruditus, and UpGrad.
According to the company sources, the round was led by Temasek-anchored impact investor ABC World Asia, and existing backers – Coatue Management, Tiger Global, GGV Capital, Westbridge, among others investing too. Besides expansion, Vedantu will also use the fund for a few acquisitions in the K12 space
Founded by Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Anand Prakash, and Saurabh Saxena in 2014, Vedantu currently provides live coaching classes for K12 students, including for entrance exams such as IIT JEE Main and Advanced for engineering and NEET for medical colleges. It also provides classes for CBSE and ICSE as well as various state boards, sample question papers, revision notes, mock tests, and previous years’ papers.
Bengaluru-headquartered Vedantu said the latest round will close over the next few weeks, with more investors joining in subsequent tranches. The Rainmaker Group acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Vedantu on their fund-raise.
As per the recent report, Vedantu gets about 35 million monthly visitors on its platform, of which about 500,000 will be paying for Vedantu by the end of the year. The founding team members are graduates of IITs, who previously founded Lakshya Institute, a test prep brand that was later sold to MT Educare.
“We still haven’t used 50% of the money from our last round (of $100 million). You can’t just raise money for the sake of raising,” , said Vedantu CEO Vamsi Krishna. There is also rumour that Vedantu will eye initial public offering (IPO) in the stock markets in the next two and a half years or so.
Vedantu last raised $100 million, led by Coatue Management in July 2020, valuing it at $600 million. Since then, fundraising hasn’t been easy for Vedantu, compared to its peers Byju’s and Unacademy, whose valuations have skyrocketed in the last 18 months.
Vedantu earlier said it was profitable on a contribution margin level, which means that its revenues cover all its variable costs, a step towards eventual profits. It currently has an annual revenue rate of $65 million, or about $5.4 million revenue a month.
