Edtech company Byju’s is expanding its physical footprint with its neighbourhood tuition centres, which will offer maths and science classes for students from Class IV to X.
Coaching will be provided in a hybrid mode, with half the classes online and half offline, with a monthly fee of around `4,500.
Himanshu Bajaj, former partner at consulting firm Kearney, who joined Byju’s five months ago to head Byju’s Tuition Centre, said the business could grow to a size of around $1 billion in two to three years. The company will invest $200 million over the next 12-18 months to set up the tuition centres. The centres will be owned by the company and it will not use franchisees.
Bajaj said while something of this size and scale and at this speed has not been attempted before, they are confident of delivering it. The company carried out successful pilots in the last five months and is running 95 centres in 23 cities. It plans to ramp up the network to 500 centres in 200 cities by 2022-end and enrol one million students. It plans to recruit 10,000 teachers.
The centres will have the same teachers moving from online to offline. Each batch will have around 25 students, and batches will be according to the educational boards. Admissions will be for the entire academic year. Each centre will have the capacity to teach 2,000 to 3,500 students on an average.
Bajaj said a large segment of customers want a physical element in addition to online teaching as children find it easier if they meet teachers and have more peer-to-peer interactions. The offline mode offers better discipline, supervision and fewer distractions for students, he said.
Byju’s will continue to use technology to track student progress, including using AI-led camera in classes to measure engagement of children.
