“It was not in our strike zone,” recalled Sanjay Swamy of early-stage fund Prime Venture, describing Physicswallah’s first institutional fundraise in 2022: $100 million at almost a unicorn valuation for a still-bootstrapped edtech. Three years on, that line is as close as anyone will get to a unifying theory of what happened next.

On 13 November, Physicswallah—now seeking a $3.2-billion valuation—breezed past full subscription for its initial public offering. Roughly 3X of what Swamy could have bought into. But the more interesting fact still isn’t the valuation. 

It’s that Alakh Pandey and Prateek Boob still owned more than 80% of the company right up until listing. Even the IPO barely grazed that—the duo together sold just Rs 380 crore worth of shares, an almost token offer-for-sale. They will now hold 72% of the company.

And that’s by design: PW will still have to meet Sebi’s 25% minimum public shareholding within three years, but in India’s consumer-internet landscape, this level of founder ownership is almost unprecedented. Deepinder Goyal owned just 5.5% at Zomato’s IPO; Harsha Majety held 5% at Swiggy; and Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma* and Lenskart’s Peyush Bansal had under 10%. Many were even gifted sharesThe KenLenskart to Bluestone: why startup founders headed for IPOs suddenly love being ‘promoters’ back by investors to maintain some semblance of control. 

Physicswallah does not resemble any of them on the cap table. 

Boob explains why: “We were a little conservative in raising funds, which is why we did only two rounds of funding… we never really had to pursue fundraising, thanks to the community built by Alakh,” he told The Ken. “Also, we did not immediately use much of the capital we raised.”

Which turns Swamy’s line from colour into causality.

By choosing to raise its first institutional capital at a near-unicorn valuation, Physicswallah filtered out the entire early-stage VC universe. Only investors willing to buy tiny slices at very high prices remained—mostly Westbridge, followed by Lightspeed.

Then Byju’s collapsed, edtech turned radioactive, and late-stage capital fled. The effect was accidental but powerful: no early, mid, or late-stage dilution.