Yuri Milner-owned DST Global is all set to invest $400 million in the Indian education startup Byju’s. Byju’s has a current valuation of $10.5 billion.
This deal could be signed as early as the weekend. If this deal gets signed, it would make the startup the second most valuable in India after PayTM, which has been heavily invested in by China-based Alibaba Holdings Group.
Yuri Milner is one of the biggest technology investors in the world and is known for backing some of the largest internet firms like Alibaba, Facebook, Twitter, etc. in their early stages. He has also funded a lot of high profile Indian startups like Flipkart, Ola, Swiggy, and Udaan.
Notably, Byju already has investments by Facebook’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Naspers Limited and Tiger Global Management. This online education service was founded by Byju Raveendran, who had scored a 100% in CAT but yet didn’t join the IIM.
The ed-tech company caters to students from kindergarten through 12th grade, and has 57 million registered users and 3.5 million paid subscribers, with 300,000 new subscribers every month. It recently doubled its revenue in the financial year that ended in March 2020 at 28 billion rupees ($373 million) from the previous financial year and is profitable, a rarity for Indian startups.
Unacademy, another leading startup is said to be raising funds at a valuation of over $1 billion, which would make it the country’s second EdTech unicorn.