From YouTube to Dalal Street: Inside PhysicsWallah’s public market play

Three years ago, few would have bet that a no-frills YouTube channel run by a passionate physics teacher could outlast India's biggest edtech giants, let alone beat them to Dalal Street. Yet Alakh Pandey’s PhysicsWallah is on the cusp of becoming the first VC-backed edtech startup to go public in India—a milestone that not even the sector’s billion-dollar poster children could reach.

For an industry built on fundraising drama and sky-high prices, PhysicsWallah’s story breaks all the rules. 

In early 2022, while Byju's, Unacademy, and Vedantu were raising hundreds of millions, a far smaller headline caught attention. A Rs 6 crore story barely registered against the sector’s madness, but it mattered because it had one word most edtech investors had given up on: profit.

In a world where losses ran into thousands of crores, a small Gurugram firm had quietly posted a 20% net margin without a single rupee of venture money.