The shares of Noida-based edtech PhysicsWallah (PW) listed at 33% premium to its issue price of Rs 109, and ended the debut trade session at Rs 156.49 with total gain of 43%.
Having joined the top 500 listed companies in India, the firm will strive to be in top 100, said founders Alakh Pandey and Prateek Maheshwari. After the Rs 3,480 crore initial share offer (IPO), promoter ownership declined from 80.62% to 72%. PW has built the country’s largest student community with 98.8M YouTube subscribers.
Pandey mentioned creating doctors and engineers from 500 villages across India and said the firm will continue expanding until it reaches “chappa chappa” (every nook and corner) of India.
On its position among the edtech players in India, Pandey said “ladka accha hai, mohalla kharab hai! That loosely translates into ‘the boy is good but the sector is bad’.
Of the funds raised, Rs 710 crore will be used for marketing to strengthen brand visibility, Rs 548 crore for lease payments of new offline and hybrid centres, Rs 460 crore for capital expenditure such as classroom equipment and infrastructure and Rs 471 crore for investment in subsidiary Xylem Learning. PW reduced its loss from Rs 1,131 crore in FY24 to Rs 243 crore in FY25.
Rigorous recruitment and intensive Faculty Training Program, centralized content development with 4,382 books and 8.66M question banks, and AI-driven tools are among its strengths. It has a 548-member tech team leveraging AI, ML, and big data for continuous innovation. The open-access model continues to serve as a lead generation funnel, where free content attracts customers to paid batches.
“We recommend subscribing to the issue as a good long-term opportunity, backed by PW’s deep regional presence, accelerating paid user growth, rapid offline scale-up, ” said the IPO note from Smifs. SBI Securities gave a neutral recommendation with a note: “PhysicsWallah does not have any listed like-to-like industry peers in India.”