Westbridge Capital-backed edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah Pvt. Ltd (PW), on Thursday, said that it has acquired iNeuron Intelligence Pvt. Ltd to expand its offerings in the upskilling category.
The deal is valued at around ₹250 crore and will provide an exit to investors including publishing house S Chand & Co.
The iNeuron team will drive the company’s tech skilling plan under PW Skills, said Alakh Pandey, co-founder and chief executive, PhysicsWallah. PhysicsWallah offers upskilling courses under the PW Skills brand, which includes business analytics programmes and computer science languages such as Java and C++.
According to co-founder Prateek Maheshwari, there is a skills gap between what has been taught at institutes and what the industry demands. “We were looking for skilling startups that had strong fundamentals and have actually helped students bag their dream jobs. We saw such capabilities in iNeuron which helped a chef turn into a coder and a UPSC aspirant with a gap of five years land a job at Amazon,“ Maheshwari said, explaining the thesis for the merger.
Launched in 2020, PW helps students prepare for engineering and medical entrance examinations. It turned unicorn early this year after it raised $100 million in its Series A funding round from marquee investors Westbridge and GSV Ventures.
Meanwhile, listed publishing and education services firm S Chand said in an exchange filing that it sold its entire stake (6.05%) in the upskilling platform for ₹14 crore. This is the second recent exit for S Chand from its various edtech investments.
In July, the company sold its stake in exam preparation platform Testbook and made an over 8x return.
