Edtech unicorn Vedantu has entered the offline teaching space after buying a majority stake in Deeksha (Ace Creative Learning) for $40 million, it said on Thursday.
Largely Karnataka-focused, Deeksha group provides a test preparation platform for board and competitive exams for students in grade 11 and 12, with significant concentration in the rural areas, helping Vedantu make in roads with its hybrid model in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 areas. In total, Deeksha has 39 centres, across three states.
“With this acquisition, our mission is to empower and scale Deeksha’s current learning model by deploying our disruptive in-house hybrid technology to reach the masses,” Vamsi Krishna, co-founder and CEO, Vedantu said.
Vedantu is the latest edtech company that has resorted to a hybrid model of functioning. Earlier, Byju’s bought Aakash Institute for $1 billion to strengthen its offline play while Unacademy too expressed plans to expand its offline centres across the country.
Alakh Pandey-led PhysicsWallah (PW) also said it would open about 500 offline centres across the country to teach students through offline and online channels.
All the aforementioned edtech companies have been entering the offline channels through acquisitions, with more to follow.
While Byju’s has made over 12 acquisitions, Unacademy has acquired about 10 edtech startups. PW too acquired PrepOnline, an online learning platform for national eligibility cum entrance test (NEET), and Altis Vortex, a publisher of exam preparation books.
As reported earlier, many smaller edtech firms are expected to either shut shop or merge with larger rivals at discounted valuations as students return to schools and colleges and the demand for online classes wanes. This could see early-stage and angel investors lose cash in earlier bets they placed. The cash crunch was already underscored when Byju’s announced it would lay off 2,500 employees and Lightspeed-backed FrontRow also laid off 75% of its workforce, or 130 employees, both on the same day.
This development also comes at a time when funding in edtech startups declined by nearly 45% to $2.2 billion in the nine months to September, data shared by private investment tracker Tracxn showed.
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