Nirvaan Birla’s edtech startup Birla Brainiacs plans to raise up to $10 million, to hire 1500 teachers in the next two years

• Birla Brainiacs is looking to raise $5-10 million in an external round of funding and is in talks with investors, according to the founder of the company.
• The e-learning startup, which was launched last year in April, is also planning to hire 1500 teachers in the next two years.
• A report by PGA Labs and IVCA says that India’s education sector is poised to grow from the current $117 billion to $225 billion in FY25.

Mumbai-based edtech startup Birla Brainiacs is looking to raise $5-10 million in an external round of funding and is in talks with investors, according to the founder of the company.

Nirvaan Birla — the founder of the startup who is the son of Yashovardhan Birla, the chairman of the Yash Birla group — said that the company is in “the market for funding” and that it has appointed an investment agency for the fund raise. He did not reveal an exact timeline on the closing of the funding round.

He also said that the startup has “approached a couple of investors” without disclosing further details.

The e-learning startup, which was launched last year in April, is also planning to hire 1500 teachers in the next two years, according to Birla.

“In the next two years we plan to hire 1000 plus teachers actually only for the tuition segment. Other than that we will be recruiting 100-200 teachers for other courses as well. Total 1500 teachers will be hired in the next two years,” Birla added.

At present it has around 50 staff members onboard with a mix of research and development, subject heads and experts, counsellors, and sales and marketing teams.

The platform caters to the needs of students from grade 1 to 12 with live sessions, video content in the form of “Flip Tales” — using cartoons and action heroes to explain the concepts. Other than that, there are also added skill development courses like vedic maths, coding, and communicative English.

Due to the global pandemic, some parents have been seemingly expressing their concerns for the safety of their children while sending them to tuition centres.

“The idea behind this is to give them the holistic platform on which they can not only progress academically, but also completely replace the needs of tuitions, because I believe after they take the app they don’t need tuitions,” Birla told Business Insider over a phone call.

Birla Brainiacs, which was incorporated in July 2019, is registered as Birla Brainiacs LLP. It is a partnership firm with two designated partners — Nirvaan Birla and Narrindraa Mohan Shetty.

He told Business Insider that the company, which initially got funded by his sister company, is now looking at an acquisition of a gamification company or a tie-up with them. Birla said he is already in talks with an Australian company, which is in the preschool space, for the same. He did not reveal the name of the firm.

The Yash Birla group has been at the centre of a storm in the not-so-distant past. Yash Birla, who runs the Yash Birla Group, was declared a wilful defaulter by lender UCO bank with an outstanding dues of over ₹67 crores.

During the pandemic-induced lockdown when all schools were shut, most school-going kids stayed at home and learned online. This gave birth to the demand for homeschooling. It is also known as home-education in which parents choose to educate their children at home only rather than sending them to schools. Homeschooling is still a relatively new concept in India.

According to research done by the company, big cities like Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad were the biggest markets for homeschooling. Birla Brainiacs claims to be the first edtech platform to introduce the concept of homeschooling. The homeschooling feature is available only till class 8, which includes all subjects along with development skill courses.

When asked about what makes Birla Brainiacs different from other edtech players in the market, he said that, “If you look at other edtech players, they either teach in huge masses where they have one teacher over 100-200 students together or they have one teacher over a student... where one teacher teaches only one child at a time. It’s not a two way interactive class. It's more like pre-recorded classes where the teacher is mainly talking.”

It is through collaborative learning style and using Flip Tales for video content that Birla Brainiacs is trying to stand out from other edtech biggies like Byju’s, Vedantu, Unacademy and so on. However, the startup is still a newbie in the edtech sector and still has to go a long way to survive amidst cut-throat competition.

Birla Brainiacs currently has around 5,000 paid users out of which 2,000 users have subscribed to the basic package. The company claims that they add close to 2,000 paid users every month and now are targeting 5,000 paid users from next month onwards.

“In the next 3-5 years, we’re looking [at a] turnover of ₹4-5 hundred crores and in terms of revenue [growth of] around 50-60% year on year, and we are planning to reach around 10 lakh paid users in the next 3-5 years,” says Birla.

Birla also told Business Insider about his plans to get the company listed in the future. “Once we hit our 5 year target turnover and 10,00,000 users… we could probably look to get into [an] IPO,” he added.

India stands second after the United States in the number of edtech startups, according to an Inc42 analysis. A report by PGA Labs and Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (IVCA) says that India’s education sector is poised to grow from the current $117 billion to $225 billion in FY25.


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