How Physics Wallah – Alakh Pandey Is Changing Indian Edtech System

Recently Physics Wallah, an edtech startup founded by Alakh Pandey, is the latest company to become the fast-growing profitable company to join the Unicorn club (a company that has a valuation of over $1 billion).

Physics Wallah had raised around $100 million in Series A Funding round from Westbridge and GSV Ventures, in its maiden funding round, which values the edtech firm at $1.1 billion.

About Physics Wallah – Alakh Pandey

Born in Allahabad  (Utter Pradesh), While growing up, Alakh had to face many difficulties. His financial condition was so bad that when he was in the sixth grade, his father was forced to sell his house. To support the family, he started conducting tutoring classes for children younger than him, when he was in class 8. And this passion for teaching continued throughout the school and college.

In an interview, Alakh said that he started teaching because of a financial need, but soon started enjoying it enough to make a career out of it. In the same interview, Pandey shared that he was able to combine his love for acting while teaching students. Taking from real-life examples and explaining difficult concepts to students became something they enjoyed doing. He wrote in a notebook of his class 12th that by 2016 he would become one of the greatest physics teachers of India.

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He decided to drop out of the engineering college and return to Allahabad, where he joined a training institute at a monthly salary of Rs 5,000. After this, Alakh also updated his YouTube channel from time to time. In 2017, he left coaching to focus on creating full-time content for the channel.

With his steady rise in popularity, his YouTube channel grew from 4,000 subscribers in 2017 to 2 million in 2019.

About Physics Wallah

In June 2020, when the country was going through a surge in COVID-19 cases, he partnered with Prateek Maheshwari to co-founded the startup and launched the Physics Wallah app.

The startup has grown at an impressive rate with revenue of Rs 350 crore registering a nine-fold growth in FY 2022.

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The platform that helps NEET and JEE aspirants prepare for the entrance now has over 50 lakh downloads on Android Play Store and over 69 lakh subscribers on the YouTube channel.

According to various reports, Alakh was offered Rs 75 crore by his competitor, but he refused.

Presently the student base of the company is from Hindi and English speaking base only; Now they want to reach out to more local language students. In an interview, Alakh said that he is ready to launch educational content in nine languages ​​including Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and Malayalam.

The company started with IIT-JEE and NEET preparation and going forward, it may add engineering PG entrance exams to its platform.

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Physics Wallah has a workforce of 19,000, which includes 500 teachers, 200 associate professors, 200 subject matter experts, and about 100 technical experts.

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