Byju buys Osmo for $120 m to add learning to its $ 4 billion digital education business

A Bangalore based educational  (edtech) and online tutoring firm  founded in 2011 by Byju Raveendran, an engineer from Azhikode a costal village in Kerala, India’s largest online tutoring startup and recent entrant to the “unicorn club” is looking to expand into international markets with its latest acquisition of US-based Osmo, a Palo Alto, California startup famous for its kid focused augmented  reality games for iPhones and iPads, for $120million, just a month after Byju secured  fresh funding  of $540million that valued the company at $3.6 billion.

Biju Raveendran has a UK based shipping company,  who taught maths to students trying to crack the entrance test to join any of the premier Indian Institute of Management.

Osmo was founded in 2013 by former Google employees Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholle whose games customised physical objects in real life are used in about 20, 000 school in the U.S. had reached a million iPads.

Byju Raveendran, said “ the acquisition will enable the two companies to “ build out an unprecedented library of engaging and entertaining educational content for a global pre-K-12 student audience.” Byju offers a popular K12 learning app used by 30 million registered users and of which 2 million of whom  are paid customers, that contains study material for students in elementary school and high school and those preparing for engineering and other graduate-level exams. Students spend more than an hour on the app daily.