The bootstrapped startup raised $100 million last week in its maiden funding round, led by WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures, making it the latest edtech firm to enter the unicorn club, or those privately held companies with a valuation of $1 billion or more.
“Within the next 35 days we will be launching a beta version of the personal coaching service, and the price will be disruptive. And we will be introducing our courses in 4-5 different Indian languages to start with,” Pandey said.
The move came after it conducted an internal survey among its 600,000 daily users, or students.
“Around six lakh students spend 90 minutes on our platform every day…we got a lot of feedback and realised that many need one-to-one coaching or personal coaching,” he added.
The prevailing market rate for personal coaching is around Rs 40,000-Rs 50,000 per student per year, and Physics Wallah will introduce the courses at a disruptive price, he said.
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Founded by Pandey and Prateek Maheshwari in 2016, PhysicsWallah prepares students for competitive engineering and medical entrance examinations.
The edtech startup, which was in the undergraduate test prep segment focussing on the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), is planning to venture into post-graduate test prep courses like Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and National Exit Test (NEXT) in the next three months.
“Apart from PG entrance courses, we will try to venture into classes six-nine as well and we are also planning to introduce test prep/entrance classes for post-graduate education,” Pandey added.
“We are also working internally to save on the burn, we have cut down or not spent much on marketing, for now, word of mouth plays a big role, however with the new investment we will work on branding,” he said.
The company is looking at inorganic expansion for PhysicsWallah through partnerships with founders who are focussed on profitability and growth.
“Acquisition is not the first priority for us, however, we are always looking for great partnerships and synergies…,” Pandey said.
The edtetch startup currently has 1,900 employees, including 500 teachers and 90-100 tech experts. It also has 200 associate professors available to answer student queries and another 200 professionals to create exam questions and term papers. It clocked a revenue of Rs 350 crore in FY22.
“The company has been profitable since inception with positive cash flows and reserves,” said Pandey. “Our revenue grew nine-fold in the year 2021-2022 compared to 2020-2021. Our current run rate for FY23 is at $65 million,” he added. “We have steady revenue and we are already 60% Ebitda positive (operating income)… however with some expansions planned Ebitda might fall to 40% but not less than that.”
Several edtech firms are presently venturing into hybrid learning models that involve both online and offline learning to combat the slowdown post-pandemic and as schools have reopened.
PhysicsWallah runs more than 20 offline centres across 18 cities with more than 10,000 students enrolled for the 2022-2023 session.
“We earned around Rs 20 crore from offline centres and we are not aggressively expanding offline presence. We will evaluate the learning outcomes and then take a call,” Pandey added.
The startup is also planning to hire at least 150-200 people in the coming months to support its expansion plans.
