Good ed-tech companies will continue to grow on the other side of the crisis as the opportunity in the sector is huge, Byju Raveendran, founder & CEO at Byju’s said on Thursday. “In terms of technology and its intervention in education, these are very early days. Education is a very important sector. It is still the only way most of us can make it big and move up the social strata. But it is one of the sectors which is grossly underinvested and neglected by almost everybody,” Raveendran said at the TiEcon summit.

Companies that are able to make an impact or develop relevant products will find room for growth. “There is no $100 billion education company in the world. There is enough and more to do. The good ones will continue growing.” Even after 10 years from now, it would be too early in terms of what technology can do for education, said Raveendran.

The ed-tech sector cornered the bulk of the start-up funding last year as students across the country signed up for ed-tech services to make up for lost school hours. In an interview with FE in late September, Raveendran had mentioned that the company added more than 25 million free users on the platform in the last five months compared to just above 40 million in the first four-and-a-half years. “Students who benefited by accessing the content signed up for subscription…We are at 4.5 million paid users on a 70 million free user base. Now, a lot of users will continue learning online on the other side of the crisis and we expect the conversion to actually increase,” Raveendran had said.

Byju’s alone secured more than $1 billion from investors; Unacademy, Eruditus and Vedantu collectively bagged over $500 million in funding in 2020.

Going ahead, the education sector is expected to see the emergence of a blended model wherein online and offline learning will co-exist, Raveendran said. While online learning has given more skilled professionals an opportunity to teach, thereby improving the quality of education, schools play a crucial role in imparting social and real-life skills to students. “Ed-tech cannot be considered different from education. At the end of the day, it is all about how we can use technology as an enabler, in some cases as a driver. Because of what has happened in the last few months, a good number of people today know that there are things which can be done better online,” Raveendran said.