Indian edtech startup Bluelearn, which is backed by Elevation Capital, Lightspeed, Titan Capital, and 2am VC, has decided to shut shop and return 70% of the capital raised to investors.
“We realised that building a venture-scale business with Bluelearn was tough. We had been very conservative with capital, allowing us to return 70% of the capital we raised back to investors,” co-founders Shreyans Sancheti and Harish Uthayakumar, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Founded by Sancheti and Uthayakumar in 2020, Bluelearn started with a Discord channel where students exchanged college notes, hung out, and talked about things they loved. It later evolved to become a platform to help its students with internships and jobs through its community.
Bluelearn founders said, in the post, “In early 2024, we went through multiple pivots, from 1-on-1 live classes to live cohort-based courses with internship placement support and we had 100s of students purchase the products with low CAC and high NPS.”
However, pivoting was easier said than done, they added. “We didn’t want to build something half-heartedly. It would be wasting our team’s time and investors’ capital. With the overall erosion of trust within the ed tech industry and more people wanting offline rather than online classes, we realised that despite having several years of runway ahead of us, we didn’t want to be stuck in a place where we had capital but an absence of path ahead,” the founders said, adding, “we made the tough decision of returning capital and winding down the company.”
The Indian edtech sector, which looked promising and witnessed significant growth during COVID-19, has now been hit by the double whammy of a funding winter and rising costs amid waning demand for online education.
Among the worst hit is Byju Raveendran-led BYJU’s, which once boasted a $22-billion valuation but has lately been under scrutiny for a host of issues. This has led to its shareholders pushing for significant changes, including the ouster of Raveendran. Compounding the turmoil, the company has witnessed the resignation of its auditor, Deloitte, and several board members. Last week, the founder lost control of the company as a tribunal kick-started an insolvency process.
Separately, SoftBank-backed edtech startup Unacademy, which has been reeling under pressure to turn profitable, is also said to be in talks to merge with K12 Techno, which runs the chain of Orchids International Schools.
