Byju Raveendran, the newest and youngest entrant on the Forbes List of 100 Richest Indians, is a former classroom teacher who developed an education app that’s grown to a valuation of almost $6 billion in seven years. He entered the list after his Think & Learn Pvt received $150 million in funding.

The founder of India’s only education-tech unicorn, Raveendran is the youngest billionaire on the list. Speaking to CNBC-TV18, he shared his success formula and how he built India’s only education-tech unicorn.

He started the venture to help students prepare for competitive exams such as CAT, GRE and GMAT. “Other coaching institutes basically identify the patterns and make the students practise hundreds of questions so that they get familiarised with all the previous questions. We don’t concentrate on that. We basically teach students the principles so that they can solve any question. We teach them how to expect questions, how to predict questions. So it is not just about doing well in the examinations, they will clearly understand the concepts so that they will be able to frame those questions,” he said.

Mohandas Pai, Chairman of Manipal Global Education, says Raveendran's idea is truly transformational. “We heard of him first when in Manipal we found a rush of young people going to a class and when we inquire as to why they are doing that, we found that there was a person named Byju Raveendran who is taking classes for them to enable them to pass their classes in the IIM and the success rate was extraordinarily high. So we contacted him. He spoke to us and we found that he was a wonderful entrepreneur and had a successful idea," Pai noted.

First Published:Dec 23, 2019 2:21 PM IST