Recently, education startup ‘Physicswala’ has achieved the status of unicorn by raising $100 million (770 crore) from investors through A series funding. Unicorns are called startup companies whose valuation crosses 1 billion dollars. The journey of the company’s CEO and its founder, Alakh Pandey, has been a long one.
Alakh Pandey was very fond of teaching from the beginning. He loved to teach children. When he was in school, he used to coach young children to help the family financially. During this, his love for teaching continued to grow.
He used to go by bicycle to teach coaching: Alakh used to go many kilometers away in the 11th to teach the children of 9th by bicycle and in the 12th class he decided to become a math teacher. After this, leaving college, later started teaching coaching to children at the Software Coaching Institute in Kanpur.
There the students liked Alakh’s method of teaching and the coaching founder advised them to start a YouTube channel. In 2014, Alakh started his YouTube channel named Physicswala. Initially, there was not much success, but Alakh remained engaged and in 2017 left the job and started teaching children on YouTube itself. By the end of 2019, his channel had over 2 million (2 million) subscribers. After the corona virus in 2020, the trend of online teaching increased significantly and it took Alakh to a new heights.
The app crashed as soon as it was launched: Alakh launched the Physicswala app in June 2020 after establishing his identity among the kids. At the same time, companies like Unacademy and BYJU’S were engaged in selling packages worth lakhs of rupees to children. Alakh started selling coaching packages for children from Rs.999. Due to this companies like Unacademy and BYJU’S are facing fierce competition in the market. According to media reports, Unacademy offered Alakh a package of up to Rs 75 crore annually to eliminate competition, but he turned it down.
Physicswala is one of the few profitable startup companies today. At present, it has made its place among the education startups of the country with more than 6 million students, more than 1500 teachers and an income of Rs 350 crores.
Alakh said, “PW (Physicswala) will use these funds for business expansion, branding, opening more PW offline centers and starting courses in other local languages.”