Unacademy is down, Byju’s is out, so who’s winning India’s education race?

The pandemic was a period of plenty for India’s edtech hopefuls. It was also their undoing. Take Bengaluru-based Vedantu, for instance. The company grew by leaps and bounds as Covid-19 forced education online, raising over $250 million between 2020 and 2022, with its valuation crossing over $1 billion.

But even as the Vedantu’s value grew, it remained decidedly loss-making. In the year ended March 2022 (FY22), its losses stood at Rs 696.2 crore, with the company letting go of around a thousand employees across multiple rounds of layoffs to stem the bleeding. While it cut its losses by 40% to Rs 372.6 crore in the following fiscal, the company is yet to crack a profit and looks back on what was supposedly its halcyon days with a mix of wistfulness and regret.

"Millions were pouring into the space, we were getting the valuations, why would we say no?" says the founder of a Bengaluru-based edtech unicorn. "We all overestimated the edtech market, and there's no denying it. Those valuations were too high,” he admits.

Today, Vedantu’s approach is a slow and steady one, a far cry from its funding-induced growth-at-all-costs mentality. “The goal is to build a sustainable education company that focuses on quality, even if it's on a smaller scale. The future of education, at least in our space, will be a mix of both offline and online," says Vamsi Krishna, co-founder and CEO of Vedantu. “I am sure Vedantu will get there eventually.”