Education technology giant Byju’s is making its biggest push to expand internationally with the launch of a new product - Byju’s Future School - that will become available in the United States, UK, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico from next month.
Byju’s, which acquired tutorial chain Aakash Educational Services for around $950 million earlier this week, said its coding-for-kids subsidiary WhiteHat Jr has played an important role in building the new platform, which will offer one-to-one teacher and student sessions.
The new international business, which will initially offer math and coding tutorials and subsequently be expanded to include science, music, English and fine arts classes, will be headed by Karan Bajaj, founder and CEO of WhiteHat Jr, the company added.
“We are combining our product expertise of ‘platform plus content’ and have been able to do so in a very short span of time. We have finished our pilots and are ready to scale this,” said Byju Raveendran, founder and CEO of Byju’s.
Raveendran added that its 11,000 women teachers from India will cater to students in English-speaking markets while it will hire teachers locally in Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia to cater to these non-English speaking markets.
The cost arbitrage of building a service out of India would exist and allow the company to run its international business at a 60-65% gross margin, with a goal of growing international revenues (from Future School and Osmo) to around $500 million within the first year itself, Raveendran said.
“We are already far ahead of some of the B2C education brands in these markets and we have a strong product market fit that we’ve already figured out,” said Raveendran. “If we are able to execute well, we will invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 1-2 years, for something that will literally be a few billion dollars in revenue.”
Bajaj, who has been overseeing the international expansion of WhiteHat Jr that will now be folded into the Byju’s Future School brand, said the platform was seeing 20,000 live sessions a day on average, taught by over 7,000 teachers, with the number of classes on weekends doubling to 40,000.
The company already has 200 teachers in Mexico with over 1,000 students on the platform in the country, he said.
For Byju’s, which has been valued at more than $13 billion after it raised $460 million in March, international markets represent an opportunity to continue growing at 100% year-on-year, which it has been able to achieve with its core offering in India over the past few years.
Raveendran said the international business could drive one-third of the group’s revenues in one year.
In terms of branding, the company said that it was looking to take all its international offerings to the market under a single Byju’s brand name. WhiteHat Jr in overseas markets will now become Byju’s Future School.
“We want to have multiple offerings from one master brand in new markets. We’re still trying to figure out what we need to do in India, because for curricular subjects we (Byju’s) are very well known, but for coding WhiteHat Jr is well known,” Raveendran said.
For now, the company is looking at its new one-to-one student to teacher offering as its most premium product that will sit above its Byju’s Learning App offering in India as well.
It said this was the natural progressions a student would make from consuming free content on the platform, to subscribing to pre-recorded content, to finally making the jump to live classes.
