Instilling the love of learning

Years of self-learning, using innovative and visual techniques, would find fruition through Byju Raveendran’s learning app ‘Byju’s Classes’.
Instilling
Instilling

KOCHI: Byju Raveendran’s love for learning with visuals began very young. His parents were teachers who encouraged him to take part in activities outside the class. Since extra-curricular activities required spending a lot of hours bunking class, Byju developed his own methods of self-study.

Little did Byju realise that all those years of self-learning, using innovative and visual techniques, would find fruition in his app ‘Byju’s Classes’. Today, this is considered as one of the most successful learning apps for students across the world. The young entrepreneur who was in Kochi recently believes that it is time people change their attitude towards learning. In his address at the TiECon, Byju said, , “Learning in India is driven by a fear of examinations, rather than a genuine interest towards learning.We need a change in education style in the country.”

At home, in Kerala, he is a rockstar among entrepreneurs. He and his startup made headlines when the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and other investors put in  $50 million or Rs 332 crore in September this year.
Hailing from Kannur, Byju Raveendran created his startup in Bangalore, with a start-up funding of over $150 million in just over a year, including from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
His app has seen 6 million downloads across the world and enjoys a paid subscription base of Rs three lakh reaping in Rs 155 crore in the first six months of this fiscal.

“In India students are not utilising their full potential as they are not learning on their own. They simply memorise answers provided by teachers. We are not changing quickly, enough even though the environment around us is changing fast. When we developed our online classes we had the students in mind. Hence we created classes in the games and movies format,” said Byju.

A mechanical engineer by profession, he started off by coaching 40 engineering students for professional entrance exams in a classroom in 2005-06 in Bangalore. The number jumped to 80 in the second week and, before long, classes were moved into auditoriums with a capacity for 1,200 and then into stadiums, which packed in students numbering more than 25,000.

He kept shuttling between nine cities in seven days. Then came the test prep videos and the coverage jumped from 9 to 45 cities. He registered his company in 2011 and after four years of painstaking research launched his product in August 2015 offering learning programs for students in classes 4-12 (K-12) and competitive exams.

A 500-strong team, made up mostly of his former students, constitute a product development team involved in constant innovation and research to fine tune the product.
“We have almost 90 per cent renewal, which is unprecedented by any industry standards. And, on an average, a student spends around 40 minutes on the app. But there is a long way to go because we have not yet covered even one per cent of the students in this country,”  Byju said.

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