Watch: Byju’s CPO on accelerating live learning for the pandemic times

It’s no surprise that edtech has surged to previously unimaginable heights post the Covid-19 lockdown, with education, like nearly everything else, moving online. Startups in the edtech space, as per a recent study, raised over $2.2 billion in 2020. 

And who led the race? Byju’s, of course, which accounted for $1.4 billion of the total capital raised. In 2021, the startup has scored capital from multiple equity funding rounds, with its latest valuation standing at $15 billion. 

The unprecedented adoption of edtech products has companies in the sector scrambling to improve their product, interface and push for better engagement. What has Byju’s done in this regard? 

We got the edtech firm’s chief product officer Ranjit Radhakrishnan to tell us.  

Radhakrishnan, who joined Byju’s in 2015, told TechCircle in an interview that the K-12 focused company accelerated synchronous learning by introducing live classes on the platform as students missed classroom teaching.  

The months following the pandemic, he said, saw over 40 million new sign ups on the platform. “We took all these years to get to 40 million while these were added in a period of few months post the lockdown,” he said.  

Gamification and interactive interface were key to the startup’s product innovation, Radhakrishnan said.  

“Kids either completely take up something or reject it if they don’t like it,” he said, adding that the company designs content where a target group of children co-create the interactive modules. 

Its current product team has 1,200 members across media and pedagogy, including AR-based learning platform Osmo, which it acquired in 2019.  

As the company grows, Radhakrsihnan said that the team will expand its employee count to over 6,000 and cater to products across geographies. It recently announced the launch of its live learning platform in US, UK, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico.