Amidst industry challenges, Indian education technology startup Physics Wallah revealed on Friday that it has raised $210 million to expand its business through acquisitions among other means.

The company is now valued at $2.8 billion, a considerable rise from its previous estimate of $1.1 billion, thanks to the fundraising headed by Hornbill Capital and including Lightspeed Venture Partners, GSV, and WestBridge.

Founded in 2020, Physics Wallah is one of the many education technology companies (ed-tech) in India that provides both free and paid courses for various competitive examinations in the country. In an effort to stand out from the competition and make its courses more affordable for children living in lower-income areas of the nation, the company offers courses that typically cost less than $50.

“We are not built for 1% of the country or 1% of the world, we are built for the remaining 99%, those who cannot go to these fancy coaching classes … now we enable different kinds of students,” In a recent interview, Physics Wallah CEO Alakh Pandey stated.

The startup offers free YouTube lessons under a freemium business model. There is a premium option for students who desire additional features like homework and tests.

According to the company, its sales increased by 250% year over year in the fiscal year that ended in March 2024. Pandey stated he anticipates the current fiscal year to have the “highest absolute” EBITDA. EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, is one metric used by businesses to gauge their profitability.

According to Pandey, the business is open to acquisitions as long as they provide them access to fresh users and content.

“Consolidation, we are open to it if it’s based on different geography that we cannot serve to, and if it caters to content and community first,” Pandey stated.

The CEO indicated the company’s prior equity investments. South Indian state of Kerala is home to the ed-tech startup Xylem Learning, in which Physics Wallah acquired a 50% share last year.

As long as a deal allows the business to gain access to fresh users and content, Pandey stated that it is open to acquisitions.

“If consolidation prioritizes content and community over geography and is based on a different geography that we cannot serve, then we are open to it,” Pandey stated.

The CEO indicated the stock investments the company has already made. Physics Wallah acquired a 50% share in Kerala, south India-based Xylem Learning, an ed-tech startup, last year.

Indian edtech problems

The organization, according to Pandey and his co-founder Prateek Maheshwari, is focused on a few major themes, such as the push for hybrid learning—both online and in traditional classroom settings—and increased internet access in India’s villages, towns, and smaller cities. All of this facilitates children’s access to education who come from less fortunate households.

Several companies sought to develop rapidly during the Covid epidemic, which led to the start of India’s ed-tech boom.

However, this growth also brought about a number of high-profile failures in the industry, such as the nearly bankrupt ed-tech company Byju, which was once valued at $22 billion and is currently dealing with many insolvency proceedings in India. A number of issues, such as aggressive acquisitions, excessive marketing expenditures, and poor management, have been blamed for its downfall.

Speaking about some of the setbacks in India’s ed-tech industry, Pandey stated that his organization is concentrated on the results it achieves for students as well as the content it provides.

“If you look at interviews or even the news stories of the actors you’re talking about, all they talk about is their outrageous valuation and the amount of money they have raised,” Pandey stated.

Education is a distinct entity. It differs from other startups in that it is possible to expand and discuss absurd valuations. Fundamentally, you have to acknowledge that you are genuinely trying to improve the lives of your students.

“I don’t believe the market has shrunk. A couple of players have struggled to perform post-Covid … but the learners are increasing year-on-year,” according to Maheshwari.

Regarding Physics Wallah’s future, Pandey stated that an IPO will occur but that a timetable will not be specified.

“An IPO is something that we will do. We want to have a strong governance in the company, we are working on that, forming a board of independent directors … it’s not that important for us when the IPO will happen, we are running the company like a public company,” Pandey stated.

Kubecost is a FinOps business that assists teams like Allianz, Audi, Rakuten, and GitLab in monitoring and optimizing their Kubernetes clusters with an emphasis on cost and efficiency. IBM announced on Tuesday that it has purchased Kubecost.

The news on Tuesday comes after IBM acquired Apptio, a different FinOps business, for $4.3 billion in 2023. Additionally, in prior years, IBM purchased businesses such as application performance monitoring startup Instana and cloud app and network management company Turbonomic. With the acquisition of KubeCost, IBM is now able to further strengthen its IT and FinOps capabilities in response to businesses’ growing need for better management of their increasingly complicated on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

“Since launching in 2019, our mission has been to optimize the world’s infrastructure,” co-founder and CEO of Kubecost Webb Brown stated on the business blog. “We started with Kubernetes cost monitoring, and we’ve proudly become the most widely adopted solution in the cloud native ecosystem. Now, as a result of this merger, we’re poised to accelerate our mission by delivering broader, end-to-end cost management solutions to teams everywhere.”

It’s important to remember that OpenCost, the foundation of Kubecost’s commercial solution, is an open source project that is vendor-neutral and created by Kubecost. OpenCost is one of the sandbox projects of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, having debuted in 2022.

Although Apptio purchased Cloudability in 2019 and Turbonomic, IBM claims that Kubecost will be integrated into its FinOps Suite. However, it wouldn’t be shocking if IBM also further integrated Kubecost/OpenCost into its OpenShift enterprise platform.

The purchase price was kept a secret by the two businesses. In 2022, Kubecost completed a $25 million Series A fundraising round headed by Coatue Management. In 2021, First financing Capital led a $5.5 million seed financing for the startup.

Pre-seed finance totaling $850,000 has been received by Ecomtent, an AI start-up that assists retailers and sellers in getting ready for the AI-driven e-commerce search of the future. The investment was spearheaded by MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF) and included senior leadership from the tech sector, Techstars x eBay Ventures, and C-Suite Angels from Retailers.

Ecoment is going to completely change how merchants and sellers are ready for a world where searches are based on LLM. Ecomtent was founded in 2022 by Timur Luguev, a PhD & Postdoctoral Researcher in Machine Learning, and Max Sinclair, who worked for six years at Amazon on strategic initiatives such as the launch of Amazon in Singapore and the EU’s first grocery store. Ecomtent’s technology allows sellers and retailers to create written and visual content that is specifically optimized for AI-powered search across large catalogues at scale, eliminating bottlenecks on internal content teams and outside agencies and saving weeks of labor.

CEO Sinclair predicted a “Ecommerce is about to change fundamentally,” in e-commerce. “Generative AI will completely transform how consumers shop online, with conversational-style search poised to become the new normal. The current best SEO practices will look completely outdated in just 12 months. Longtail keyword matching is dead, and the future will be matching customer intent across both written and visual assets.”

With two major retailers having annual revenues of $11 billion and $14 billion, respectively, the company has already completed successful pilots with both, demonstrating considerable market progress. These successes have made Ecomtent a popular choice among Amazon Seller and Amazon Agency communities, allowing these clients to produce infographics, optimized content, A+ Content, and high-quality lifestyle photos at scale. With a recent submission approved by the USPTO, its patent-pending technology has demonstrated that AI-generated content may raise product listing conversion rates by as much as 30%.

“I have been incredibly impressed with Ecomtent’s technology, which has augmented our internal content team’s speed and scale to be 10x more productive,” stated Vincenzo Toscano, CEO of Full-Service Amazon and Walmart Agency Ecomcy. A key component of succeeding in e-commerce is having the appropriate software tools in your toolbox, according to Ben Leonard, a seven-figure Amazon seller and best-selling author of Quit Stalling and Build Your Brand. Beyond simply being the product listing tool of the future, ecomtent currently outperforms its closest, more established competitors in terms of results.

With the help of this most recent fundraising round, Ecomtent will be able to develop faster, hire more people, improve its AI capabilities, and extend its operations in order to satisfy the increasing demand from companies figuring out how to use AI-powered search. According to Emil Savov, Managing Director of MaRS IAF, “We are excited by the unique composition of Ecomtent’s founding team, and the specialist AI talent from elite institutions they have recruited around them, to capitalize on this moment of incredible opportunity to build a category-defining business.”