4th Acquisition in 7 months - Byju's Acquires Scholr for about 15 Crores: Report

According to an Entracker report, Byju's has acquired Edtech Scholr in an all-cash deal. The deal has been signed early this month and likely to be announced soon, stated the report. The size of the deal is in the range of Rs 15-20 crore, it further added. “Soon after Byju’s talks with Doubtnut failed, the company started scouting for a startup with a similar DNA. Scholr fits the bill as its offerings are parallel to Doubtnut. The acquisition of Scholr will also mark Byju’s foray into on-demand doubt clearance space,” it adds.

The EdTech giant is in late-stage talks to acquire EdTech Toppr. The $150 Mn deal will be the Unicorn’s third-largest deal; it acquired Whitehat in a $300 Mn all-cash deal and Aakash institute for $1 Billion.

About Byju’s

Byju's was founded by Byju Raveendran, a former teacher and the son of educators, who conceived the smartphone app in 2011. Byju's caters to students from kindergarten to the 12th grade and has been adding over 5 million users a month. The app provides lessons in maths and science through video animations and games.

India has about 250 million students in the K-12 grades. Byju's app has around 70 million registered students and 4.5 million annual paid subscribers, as per the company. The company has doubled its revenue to Rs 2,800 crore in FY19-20 from Rs 1,430 crore in the previous fiscal.

About Scholr

A team of IIT alumni (Himanshu Nimje, Manil Gupta, Piyush Agarwal and Aniket Singh) founded the startup in 2015. The web and mobile platform help students use AI to help with doubt solving almost daily. The AI-based edtech platform Scholr helps students solve any kinds of doubts while studying. The platform uses AI where it does not even need human tutors. The auto-answering platform provides video solutions for class 6 to 10 students. They need to click and upload pictures of their queries to find instant solutions across subjects including Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology etc.

The company specialises in homework help across NCERT textbooks, state board textbooks and other board books. The app also provides academic support to users from peers and experts on the platform. Already, over 70% of Scholr users are from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities where students lack quality educational support but have ready access to mobile devices. Further, Scholr has raised around $382K in different seed adjusts from Zone Startups India, 50K Ventures, Edupreneur Village Fund and IIIT-H Seed Fund and Xseed Partners.