Byju's Acquires Education Platform Great Learning For $600 Million

Digital learning platform Byju's has acquired higher education platform Great Learning and after-school learning app Toppr. Byju's has spent $600 million to acquire Great Learning while $150 million have been spent on acquiring Toppr, according to media reports and regulatory filings. The development has come less than a week after it acquired the US-based online reading platform for children, Epic for $500 million.

In April this year, Byju's had acquired Aakash Educational Services Ltd for $1 billion.

The edtech company will enter the upskilling and reskilling segment with the acquisition of Great Learning. This will also expand its product base, media reports said.

Great Learning provides higher learning degree, diploma and certificate courses across domains such as data science, digital marketing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, in association with recognised universities globally.

With these two latest acquisitions, Byju's has acquired six startups in 2021 in India as well as in the United States of America.

The edtech company has spent around $2 billion in acquiring companies involved in the field of education and learning technology in 2021 alone.

Byju's plans to put to use its technology with Great Learning's professional courses in areas like cloud computing, reports said.

Acquisitions by Byju's of companies involved in providing similar services like its own will boost its offerings, especially owing to growing demand for online education amid Coronavirus-induced lockdowns.

“We are seizing an opportunity to create a very large edtech company for the world,” Byju Raveendran, founder and CEO of Byju's was quoted by media reports, citing a video call.

“India's edtech startups have a huge competitive advantage to capture the global market,” he was further quoted as saying.

Great Learning founders Mohan Lakhamraju, Hari Nair and Arjun Nair will remain and run it as an independent unit.

Media reports quoting Mr Lakhamraju further said that Great Learning plans to grow its annual subscription revenue to $1 billion “within the next years” from the existing $100 million.

Great Learning's courses are aimed at solving real-world problems through a practical approach, in contrast to “traditional learning in universities,” he said.

Great Learning, which was founded in 2013, collaborates with Indian and foreign universities including some big names like Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Last week, Byju's had acquired Epic, which is a digital reading platform for children, for $500 million, which is around ₹ 3,700 crore approximately.

The edtech major had said that it will further invest $ 1 billion in North America to accelerate its vision of helping students fall in love with learning.

The taking over of Epic will help Byju's expand its footprint in the United States by giving access to more than two million teachers and 50 million children under Epic's existing user base across the world, which has more than doubled over the last year, the company had said.