Decoding Byju's $300-million acquisition of WhiteHat Jr

That’s a high price tag for a two-year-old company that teaches kids how to code. What makes WhiteHat Jr attractive to Byju’s? Is it the 3 million students, 5,000 teachers, $150-million annual run rate, or something else?

The $300-million deal with Byju's raised many eyebrows for multiple reasons

WhiteHat Jr's advertising and sales is high-decibel—featuring stalwarts such as Bill Gates, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg...

...without their explicit consent. But, surely, Byju's doesn't need WhiteHat Jr to make itself look good

It is tempting to lazily assume that Byju's decision was just a simple “buy vs build” choice. It can't be

“Who is John Galt?”

Thus begins Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s epochal novel. A shadowy figure for the most part of the book, Galt ultimately turns out to be turns out to be Wikipedia John Galt Read more the individualistic personification of the culture of that age.

The modern equivalent of this would probably be:

“Who is Wolf Gupta?”

For the uninitiated, Wolf Gupta is apparently a “12-year-old who learnt AI to get a Rs 1.2 cr ($160,000) job from Google while other kids his age didn’t know what to do after school”.

AUTHOR

Sumanth Raghavendra

Sumanth is a serial entrepreneur with more than eighteen years experience in running startups. He is currently the founder of Deck App Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup attempting to re-imagine productivity software for the Post-PC era. Sumanth’s columns appear regularly in leading publications. He holds MBA degrees from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, USA.

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