There is an urban legend that circulates within the corridors of Byju’s, India’s largest edtech company. Every employee has heard it. What’s more, given the decidedly hierarchical and centralised organisational structure, every employee believes it to be true. 

Rumour has it that before Byju Raveendran, the eponymous founder, acquires a company, he puts it through a litmus test. If Byju’s son likes the product, the legend goes, he buys the company. That’s how WhiteHat Jr, India’s fastest growing coding startup, was scooped upThe KenDecoding Byju’s $300-million acquisition of WhiteHat Jr by Byju’s for a cool US$300 million in June 2020. WhiteHat Jr was barely 18 months old at the time.

Beyond rumours, of course, are cold, hard numbers that WhiteHat Jr projected like beacons before the buyout. Between June and July, WhiteHat Jr claimedExchange4mediaIn the first month of acquisition, WhiteHat Jr's revenue run rate was $220M: Karan Bajaj its revenue run rateRun rateThe run rate refers to the financial performance of a company based on using current financial information as a predictor of future performance. The run rate functions as an extrapolation of current financial performance and assumes that current conditions will continue doubled from US$75 million to US$150 million. The company also claims to have four million users, of which 100,000 have paid for the service. There was no better way for Byju’s to both establish itself in the up-and-coming ‘coding for kids’ category and also take out a rival that was doubling its revenue projections month-on-month.

“This is what Byju’s does well. It’s not an innovative company. Neither is it a product company. So it acquires other companies that have figured out a product, and applies its aggressive sales and marketing strategies on top,” says a former senior executive at Byju’s. The executive wished not to be identified as he didn’t want to publicly comment on a previous employer. “It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle of successful companies together,” he says.

Byju’s has used this strategy effectively from the very beginning. In 2015, Byju’s acquired Infinite Student, a modest startup with a few thousand users that had built software to stream videos online.