On Thursday, Byju’s, India’s most reputed and valued ed-tech company declared it will acquire Tynker, a US-based coding platform for children. This is the freshest in a series of takeovers by the ed-tech giant this year to fortify its leadership in the K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) division, even as it shows a plan to list on the public markets in the US. Byju’s breathtaking movement of fund-raising and acquiring has earned it the moniker of ‘Buyju’s’ in the internet ecosystem.
NextBigBrand was the first one to break this story Byju’s-Tynker deal on August 16, 2021.
Tynker is in fact its 9th acquisition of 2021, coming on the crusts of byju’s such as Aakash, Great Learning, Epic, Scholr and Gradeup as Byju’s buttresses its product holdings to go after diverse sections such as K12, test prep, upskilling and learning.
It is also reportedly in talks with investors to raise $1.5 billion, at an estimate of over $21 billion, after which it could glance at the listing in the US. Byju is currently valued at $16.5 billion, making it the most valued unicorn in India.
Tynker was established by Krishna Vedati, Srinivas Mandyam, and Kelvin Chong in 2012 in Mountain View, California. It educates kids of age-group between 5-18 on how to occur coding skills. Its coding platform has been used by over 60 million kids and 100,000 schools in 150 countries already.
“We wanted to give our children a life skill or a craft they can use to become anything they want to become. We focussed on self-learning and an interest-driven approach, trying to make it fun and interesting,” Krishna Vedati said.
His co-founder Srinivas Mandyam added that 1 in 3 schools in the US already use Tynker, giving Byju’s an enormous foothold in North America and it expects its India reach will go up after it is newly published an Android version on playstore.
“At Tynker, we believe that kids of all ages should develop the critical thinking skills needed to become the ‘makers of tomorrow’,” said Vedati.
Though, Byju’s Chief Strategy Officer Anita Kishore, who has been performing a crucial role in managing their acquisition strategy says they don’t keep count.
“We don’t keep track of numbers and don’t work with a target number. Each of these acquisitions has been very specific. Tynker is a product that we have been looking at for a while and we first met them 2-3 years ago.,” Kishore told Moneycontrol in an interview.
Surprisingly, the Tynker acquisition will be the second in the coding space after Whitehat Junior, which Byju’s bought for $300 million in August 2020. Byju’s has settled over $2 billion to buy nine companies this year. Raveendran confirmed that they are going towards IPO but said it’s too early to comment on a definite timeline.
