Alakh Pandey is scaling up tech to solve education in rural India

Pandey's edtech firm PhysicsWallah is on a mission to reach every corner of the country and connect with over 250 million students by 2025

Alakh Pandey, the founder and chief executive officer of edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah (PW) was recently down due to coronavirus infection and suffered from high fever and body aches. But now he is back into action and focusing on PW’s mission to reach every corner of the country and connect with over 250 million students by 2025.
 

“It took me 20 days to recover. I am fine now,” says Pandey. During those days, he was encouraging his students through social media to prepare well for the exams and give their best.
 

However, Pandey says that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of education technology and services of his firm. Noida-based PW was launched during the pandemic in 2020. It offers both free and paid online courses to students. The firm now has over 22 million subscribers across 39 YouTube channels. It has more than 10 million app downloads. Pandey says that the company witnessed about 230 per cent growth in terms of the number of new students who joined the platform in the last one year.
 

“I can see the boom in online education for us. With online we can reach to places where offline is not possible,” says Pandey. “Affordability is a key here. Earlier the students who didn’t have coaching facilities in their hometowns had to move to different States to pursue education and spent lakhs of rupees. But PW is enabling them to get access to the best educators for a few thousand rupees.”
 

Though PW has been able to bring affordability by offering courses that cost Rs 4,000 course per annum,  Pandey said this is still costly for a large number of students in the country. And he wants to solve this problem. There are also other challenges such as access to the internet, data packages as well as the ability to buy smartphones. Pandey has plans to make a ‘study phone’ which would have different learning apps as well access to the internet. 
 

“The ‘study-phone’ would be helpful in places where students don’t have access to smartphones,” says Pandey.
 

PW is also looking to tap the government schools, especially in Tier-2 and Tier-3 locations to solve the education problem at a mass level. It aims to use smart technology in the classrooms there.
 

By leveraging in-house tech innovations, the company has already made quality learning completely hybrid and highly affordable to the student masses. 
 

For instance, PW came up with an offering called ‘Khazana’ which is a repository of lectures. Here students can watch previous lectures whenever they want.
 

“It is like Netflix of education, where you can find the content of all the teachers,” says Pandey.
 

The brainchild of Alakh Pandey and Prateek Maheshwari, PW, started its journey in 2016 as a YouTube channel to coach JEE and NEET aspirants by Alakh Pandey himself. Fast forward to today, after launching the app with Maheshwari’s tech integration in 2020, it scaled up and is now preparing students for multiple competitive exams. These include GATE, UPSC, Railways, Banking, CTET, and CA. It has also launched post-graduate courses and PW Skills for career-building and upskilling.
 

PW which competes with players such Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu, is a rare profit-making edtech startup. This comes at a time when top tech unicorns especially edtech companies are witnessing steep losses and are laying-off employees in an attempt to conserve cash amid a funding winter and macro-economic uncertainty.
 

PhysicsWallah (PW)  reported its standalone operating revenues for the financial year 2021-22 as Rs 232.48 crore, a nine-fold rise from Rs 24.59 crore in FY21. The firm reported a net profit of Rs 97.8 crore, a surge of 14 times from Rs 6.93 crore in the previous financial year, according to data accessed by the business intelligence platform, Tofler. 
 

PW’s standalone expenses were Rs 103.17 crore, a six-fold increase from Rs 15.36 crore in the previous financial year. In FY22, PW’s employees' benefit expenses were Rs 42.18 crore,  reporting over 20 times the rise against Rs 2.01 crore in the previous fiscal.
 

For the just-concluded FY2023, PW expects to report a ‘sizable profit’ witnessing a three-fold increase in revenue to about Rs 780 crore. For the ongoing financial year (FY 2023-24), the company is targeting revenue of Rs 2,500 crore at the group level. This is driven by the expansion of business.
 

“What we did right is that we have been focusing very strongly on education and technology,” says Pandey. “Also, you need to show the students that your content is good and are completing the course on time.”
 

Last year, PW became India’s 101st unicorn by raising $100 million in Series A funding from WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures. The company was valued at $1.1 billion after closing the transaction. PW is using these funds for business expansion, branding and opening more PW learning centres.
 

The platform has already made provisions for launching courses in vernacular languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Odia, Malayalam, and Kannada. 
 

PW is also setting up offline centres. Such facilities are designed to assist engineering and medical aspirants, providing them with a competitive and friendly learning environment with a 24/7 doubt-clearing facility. It provides offline and hybrid coaching through its Vidyapeeth and Pathshala across India. The firm said that it has rolled out 50 offline centres, which it brands as ‘Vidyapeeth Centers’, with an investment of around Rs 82 crore in technologies at these new units.
 

The company now employs about 7,500 people. It is looking to hire another 2500 people in the next few months. These include teachers, business and data analysts, counsellors, and operations managers.
 

PW has also been making acquisitions. Last year in October, it acquired test preparation edtech company PrepOnline and book publisher Altis Vortex for an undisclosed amount in a mix of cash and stock deal. With the acquisition of PrepOnline, PW forayed into the online competitive exam preparation segment and the acquisition of Altis Vortex marked its entry into the book publishing domain. Last year, in August, PW acquired FreeCo, a Jaipur-based doubt solver and resource management firm. Last year in December, it acquired iNeuron Intelligence Pvt. Ltd to expand its offerings in the upskilling category.
 

“We partner with organisations which we think are like us and are present in small towns and cities,” said Pandey. “We then help them scale up.”