Byju’s, India’s most valuable start-up, has acquired US-based digital reading platform Epic for $500 million, strengthening its position in the education technology (edtech) sector. The acquisition will help Byju’s expand its US footprint by providing access to the more than two million teachers and 50 million kids in Epic’s existing global user base, which more than doubled over the last year, it said.
Byju’s, which has seen a spike in business as schools shut down physical classes because of the pandemic, said it will invest $1 billion in North America to help students fall in love with learning. Epic, which sells subscriptions for a digital library for students under 12 years, will soon be available in India and other English-speaking markets such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
“Epic’s model for inspiring the next generation through interactive reading is in lockstep with our mission to help millions of children become life-long learners. We welcome Epic’s talented leadership team and employees to the Byju’s family as we endeavour to help students fall in love with learning across the world,” said Anita Kishore, chief strategy officer of Byju’s.
“It’s very different how kids learn at different level — at individual level, subject level, age level or grade level — so what we have done is that for a lot of these early-age group level we have used a lot of these movie-like or game-like interaction to make sure that they get interested in the subject. By bringing that interactive appeal, we have been able to engage, but at the end of the day we are an educational company and our core strength has been how do you simplify a concept, how do you help them visualise the context and how do you help them contextualise the concept.”
Byju Raveendran, CEO of BYJU’s
