Startup Deep Dive : Toppr — sold to BYJU’S for a reported $150 million, then shrank inside it

In July 2021, BYJU’S paid a reported $150 million for Toppr, an eight-year-old Mumbai test-prep app that IIT Bombay graduates Zishaan Hayath and Hemanth Goteti had built into one of India’s best-known K-12 learning brands. The catch: Toppr’s own revenue had just fallen 40% year-on-year, from Rs 84.32 crore in FY20 to Rs 50.6 crore in FY21, even as the pandemic was sending almost every other Indian online-learning app to record highs.

Within a year of the deal closing, BYJU’S had let go of more than 350 permanent Toppr employees and around 600 contract staff as it folded the app into its own test-prep stack. By 2026, workforce-tracking data put Toppr’s headcount 23.1% below its 2023 level, a shrinking unit inside a parent that was, by then, fighting its own insolvency case in front of India’s bankruptcy tribunal. This is the story of how a founder-run edtech that raised close to a hundred crore-and-then-some in venture money ended up as a rounding error in someone else’s crisis.

Quick facts

What they do

Toppr built an adaptive-learning app for students in classes 5 through 12, aimed at two overlapping jobs: helping them keep pace with their school board syllabus (CBSE, ICSE, state boards) and preparing them for competitive entrance exams such as JEE and NEET. The core product paired self-paced video lessons and a large practice-question bank with live doubt-resolution, wrapped in an annual subscription. Around that core, Toppr layered two adjacent businesses: Toppr School OS, a business-to-business tool that let schools run homework, attendance and after-school learning digitally, and Toppr Codr, a live one-on-one coding program for children aged roughly six to eighteen. By the time BYJU’S acquired it, Toppr described itself as serving students across K-12 with all three products under one brand, competing directly with BYJU’S itself in the school-learning segment.

The origin

Zishaan Hayath grew up in Hyderabad, lost his father young, and moved to Mumbai in 2005 to study at IIT Bombay. He first tried entrepreneurship in April 2008 with Chaupaati Bazaar, a phone-order e-commerce venture that let customers call in and order electronics and magazines; it was acquired by Future Group in September 2010, and Hayath stayed on as vice-president of product at the group’s Futurebazaar arm. The insight that led to Toppr came from watching how much Indian families were paying for after-school coaching classes just to keep up at school or crack an entrance exam. In January 2013 he quit Futurebazaar to build a digital alternative, bringing in Hemanth Goteti, a fellow IIT Bombay graduate in aerospace engineering who had led engineering at Futurebazaar and, before that, at Chaupaati Bazaar, as co-founder. The pitch was simple: put the same test-prep content on a phone, priced as a subscription rather than a coaching-centre fee. In its first year, Toppr signed up more than 30,000 students and was adding roughly 10,000 a month, with 40% of usage already coming through mobile.

The struggle years

Toppr’s growth was never free of a widening hole underneath it. In FY19, revenue jumped 2.5 times to Rs 56.4 crore from Rs 23 crore in FY18, but losses grew even faster: from Rs 59.86 crore to Rs 93.45 crore, pushing cumulative losses past Rs 225 crore by the end of that year. Operating expenses that year rose 81% to Rs 154.4 crore, with employee costs alone at Rs 80 crore, more than half of every rupee spent. The company was, by its own filings, spending Rs 2.74 to earn one rupee of revenue in FY19, an improvement on FY18’s Rs 3.72 but still deeply loss-making.

The sharper, more unsettling setback came two years later. FY21 should have been Toppr’s best year: India’s schools were shut for most of the year, and rival edtech platforms were reporting record enrolment as families turned to apps out of necessity. Instead, Toppr’s revenue from operations fell 40% to Rs 50.6 crore from Rs 84.32 crore in FY20, while losses still climbed 13.1% to Rs 128.3 crore, taking cumulative losses to Rs 467.5 crore (roughly $48.7 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026) by March 2021. Unit economics worsened in step: Toppr was now spending Rs 3.54 to make one rupee of revenue, up from Rs 2.42 the year before, and its EBITDA margin fell to -234.34% from -108.76%. A company built to profit from a shift to digital learning had shrunk during the one year that shift was forced on the entire country.

The turning point

On 24 July 2021, BYJU’S announced it was acquiring Toppr, alongside a separate $600 million deal for the Singapore-based upskilling platform Great Learning. The reported price for Toppr was $150 million, roughly Rs 1,100 crore, structured with about two-thirds paid in BYJU’S stock and the rest in cash, according to reporting on the deal at the time. Toppr’s own disclosures around the acquisition put the stock portion at Series F preference shares worth Rs 426 crore (about $57.2 million) allotted to seven existing shareholders: Helion Ventures (Rs 178.05 crore), Eight Roads (Rs 87.2 crore), FH Learn LLP (Rs 64.4 crore), Kaizen PE (Rs 54 crore), Learn 2 Holdings (Rs 34.8 crore), Alteria Capital (Rs 7.05 crore) and founder-investor Ramakant Sharma (Rs 42.5 lakh).

The numbers either side of the deal tell the real story. Going in, Toppr had roughly 35 million monthly active users and 2 million daily active users, a February 2018 valuation of about $60 million that had since been talked up to a reported $150-200 million range on later funding rounds, and a FY21 balance sheet showing revenue down 40% and losses still rising. Coming out, it had a fixed $150 million price tag from a buyer whose own founder, Byju Raveendran, described Toppr’s role bluntly in the wider portfolio: BYJU’S already leaned on Aakash for test prep and Great Learning for upskilling, which left Toppr as a school-segment bolt-on rather than a business BYJU’S needed to keep independent. A company that had spent eight years and roughly a hundred million dollars of venture money building a standalone brand became, in one transaction, a smaller piece inside a much larger one.

The money behind it

• Series C, December 2018: $35 million (Rs 246.13 crore) led by Kaizen Private Equity with SAIF Partners, Helion Ventures, Eight Roads Ventures, Alteria Capital and Brand Capital participating; industry executives cited by Inc42 at the time estimated the post-money valuation at $150-200 million.
• Series D, July 2020: Rs 350 crore (about $46.7 million) led by Foundation Holdings, with continued participation from Kaizen Private Equity, taking cumulative funding to Rs 700 crore (about $93 million) by Inc42’s count; the round funded the launch of Toppr Codr and Toppr School OS.
• Total raised before the BYJU’S sale: reported figures range from $93 million (Entrackr, at the time of the July 2021 acquisition) to $116 million across 13 rounds (Tracxn’s 2026 company profile) — the two sources disagree on total but agree Toppr never crossed into the hundreds of millions that BYJU’S itself, or rivals like Unacademy and Vedantu, had raised by then.
• Key backers and what changed: SAIF Partners was the largest shareholder at 16.57% at the time of acquisition, followed by Eight Roads Ventures (15.92%) and Helion Ventures (15.68%); Kaizen Private Equity, which led both the 2018 and 2020 rounds, was the investor that pushed the company from a single learning app toward the School OS and Codr adjacencies that BYJU’S later inherited.
• Exit: a reported $150 million all-in from BYJU’S in July 2021, paid roughly two-thirds in stock and one-third in cash — a sale, not a write-off, but one struck while Toppr’s own revenue was falling.

How it makes money

Toppr’s revenue came almost entirely from direct-to-consumer annual subscriptions sold to parents, priced by grade and exam track, plus emerging B2B licensing revenue from School OS as it signed up schools from 2020 onward. There was no marketplace take rate to speak of: a family paid Toppr directly for a year of access to video lessons, practice tests and doubt-resolution, and Toppr kept the whole subscription minus the cost of producing and selling it. That cost structure is the part most outside observers get wrong about Indian edtech: the money did not mostly go into building better AI or content. In FY21, employee benefit costs of Rs 109.31 crore made up 61% of Toppr’s entire cost base, followed by advertising and marketing at Rs 15.56 crore and server/SaaS costs of just Rs 12.2 crore. In plain terms, Toppr was less a technology margin business than a telesales-and-content organisation: most of every rupee spent went to the counsellors, content writers and subject-matter experts needed to sell and service annual subscriptions one family at a time, which is also why margins never turned positive even as revenue scaled in the good years.

The numbers

• FY18 to FY19: revenue up 2.5X, losses up 56%, cumulative losses cross Rs 225 crore (Entrackr, citing FY19 filings).
• FY19 to FY20: revenue up 49.5%, losses up 21.4%, net operating cash outflow of Rs 20.74 crore (Entrackr, citing FY20 filings).
• FY20 to FY21: revenue down 40%, losses up 13.1%, cumulative losses reach Rs 467.5 crore, net operating cash outflow balloons 6.2X to Rs 128.07 crore (Entrackr, citing FY21 filings).
• Toppr has not disclosed standalone financial results as a separate filer for years after FY21; from FY22 its numbers were absorbed into BYJU’S consolidated group accounts.

Where the money comes from

Toppr never broke out a formal revenue-by-segment or revenue-by-geography split in its public filings, so any precise percentage split would be invented rather than sourced — and this piece cuts what it cannot verify. What the company’s own disclosures do show is a product mix, not a segment table:

• Core K-12 learning app: the original and dominant product line, sold as an annual subscription to students preparing for school boards and competitive exams; Toppr reported over 1.3 crore registered students on the platform as of its July 2020 funding round.
• Toppr School OS: a B2B school-management layer launched around the July 2020 round, monetised through institutional licensing rather than parent subscriptions — a newer, smaller revenue line at the time of the BYJU’S deal.
• Toppr Codr: a coding-for-kids product launched in July 2020, positioned to complement rather than replace the core test-prep subscription.
• Geography: Toppr operated only in India, across school boards and languages, with no disclosed international revenue.

The genuine surprise sits in the cost data rather than the revenue mix: for a company selling itself as an AI-adaptive learning platform, the single biggest line item every year was human employee cost, not technology or content amortisation — 61% of total costs in FY21 alone.

The risks

• Parent-company insolvency risk: Toppr has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Think & Learn Pvt Ltd (BYJU’S) since 2021. In January 2024, GLAS Trust Company LLC — administrative agent for lenders owed more than 85% of BYJU’S $1.2 billion term loan — filed for insolvency proceedings against BYJU’S at the NCLT’s Bengaluru bench (filed 22 January 2024, formally registered 21 February 2024), the fourth such insolvency petition against the group within six months. A subsidiary’s product roadmap, marketing spend and even continued operation depend on a parent tied up in bankruptcy litigation.
• Integration and redundancy risk: mergers of this kind routinely shed the acquired company’s own workforce once functions are centralised. By late June 2022, less than a year after the deal closed, BYJU’S had laid off more than 350 permanent Toppr employees and around 600 contract staff, citing a need to “optimise teams to recalibrate business priorities.” Headcount kept falling afterward: from 1,259 employees in 2023 to 968 in 2026, a 23.1% decline, per workforce-tracking data from Revelio Labs.
• A monetisation model that never proved out: even in its strongest independent year, FY20, Toppr spent Rs 2.42 to earn one rupee of revenue; by FY21 that had worsened to Rs 3.54. A subscription-and-telesales model with a cost base 61% weighted to employee expense had not found a path to profitability on its own before the sale, and nothing in the public record shows that changing once it became part of a larger, equally loss-making group.

The takeaway

Toppr’s arc is a reminder that a sale is not the same as a rescue. Being acquired by a bigger, faster-growing rival can look like validation from the outside — a reported $150 million exit is not a small outcome for a founder-run business — but it only protects what is being bought if the buyer needs it intact. BYJU’S already had Aakash for test prep and Great Learning for upskilling; Toppr filled a school-segment gap, and once that gap was filled, the parts of Toppr that did not fit BYJU’S own plan, roughly 80% of its people within a year, were the first things to go. The lesson for any founder weighing a strategic acquisition over raising another round is to ask not just what the buyer is paying, but what the buyer actually needs to keep running once the deal is signed. Toppr’s technology and brand survived; the organisation that built them largely did not.

Frequently asked questions

What did Toppr do?

Toppr ran an adaptive learning app for students in classes 5 to 12, combining video lessons, a practice-question bank and live doubt-resolution for school-board and competitive-exam preparation, alongside a B2B school-management product (School OS) and a coding program for kids (Codr).

Who founded Toppr and when?

Zishaan Hayath and Hemanth Goteti, both IIT Bombay graduates, founded Toppr in Mumbai in January 2013 after Hayath left his role as vice-president of product at Futurebazaar.

How much did BYJU’S pay to acquire Toppr?

BYJU’S announced the acquisition on 24 July 2021 for a reported $150 million (roughly Rs 1,100 crore), paid mostly in BYJU’S stock with the remainder in cash, according to contemporaneous reporting by Entrackr and other outlets.

Why did Toppr’s revenue fall in FY21 despite the pandemic online-learning boom?

Toppr’s own FY21 filings, reported by Entrackr, show revenue falling 40% year-on-year to Rs 50.6 crore even as losses rose 13.1% to Rs 128.3 crore — a decline the company’s public disclosures do not explain in detail, but one that stood out against a sector otherwise reporting pandemic-driven growth.

What happened to Toppr after the BYJU’S acquisition?

BYJU’S laid off more than 350 permanent Toppr employees and around 600 contract staff by mid-2022 as part of integration, and Toppr’s disclosed headcount continued shrinking through 2026, even as its parent BYJU’S faced its own insolvency proceedings starting January 2024.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, July 2021 — “Exclusive: Byju’s acquires Toppr and Great Learning”
• officechai, July 2021 — “Byju’s Acquires Great Learning For $600 Million, Toppr For $150 Million”
• Inc42, December 2018 — “Edtech Startup Toppr Raises $35 Mn From Kaizen, SAIF Partners To Increase Brand Visibility”
• Inc42, July 2020 — “Toppr Bags $47 Mn To Expand Code-Learning Platform Codr, School OS”
• Entrackr, May 2020 — “Toppr revenue jumps 2.5X in FY19; marketing expense balloons 2.6X”
• Entrackr, January 2022 — “Toppr’s scale shrinks 40% in FY21 while losses increase 13%”
• Inc42, June 2022 — “After WhiteHat Jr, BYJU’S Owned Toppr Lays Off 350+ Employees”
• Indiablooms, January 2024 — “American finance company approaches NCLT to initiate insolvency proceedings against Byju’s”
• Revelio Labs, 2026 — Toppr employee headcount data
• Tracxn, 2026 — Toppr company profile and funding history
• Open (The Magazine), 2015 — “Zishaan Hayath, Founder & CEO, Toppr”
• CIOL — “CxO of the Week: Hemanth Goteti, Co-founder, Toppr”

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