Byju’s, India’s most valued internet company, said on July 21 it’s acquired US-based reading platform Epic for $500 million, continuing its spree of huge acquisitions to expand its education services beyond the Indian market and across categories.
Epic is made on a set of over 40,000 popular, high-quality books from 250 of the world’s best publishers. Its recommendations are customised to the child’s interests and fogeys can track progress and see the time spent in reading. It also has original stories which can appeal to kids. The cash and stock breakup of the deal wasn’t specified.
“Epic’s model for uplifting subsequent generation through interactive reading is in lockstep with our mission to assist many children become life-long learners,” said Anita Kishore, Chief Strategy Officer, Byju’s.
Byju’s said it’ll invest a billion dollars in North America and considers the region one among its most lucrative markets. this is often not Byju’s first raid the US. In 2019 it acquired educational games-maker Osmo, another US-based firm for $120 million.
Last year Byju’s also acquired coding startup WhiteHat Jr., which also considers the US a key market. Byju’s last month launched Future School, a web one-on-one live learning platform for math and coding. Future School is led by Karan Bajaj, founder and CEO of WhiteHat Jr.
“We created Epic to form quality books more accessible to kids everywhere, and to create a secure place for them to get the enjoyment and magic of reading in their own way…Together (with Byju’s), we will help empower future generations of youngsters by fostering a lifetime love for reading and learning,” said Suren Markosian, CEO and co-founder of Epic.
Large acquisitions became the bedrock of Byju’s, which was valued at $16.5 billion last month, raising $350 million from UBS, private equity giant Blackstone, Abu Dhabi state fund ADQ, Phoenix Rising and video conference firm Zoom’s founder Eric Yuan. The deal made Byju’s India’s most precious internet firm before fintech company Paytm.
In the last year, Byju’s has made acquisitions worth over $2 billion, including offline test prep firm Aakash, WhiteHat Jr., smaller K12-rival Toppr, GradeUp and Great Learning among others. a number of these deals are reported by other publications and not all of them are announced yet.
“Reading fluency is prime for tutorial development because problems with this skill can interfere with a student’s ability to find out other subjects as they create their way through later grades,” Byju’s statement said.
