When BYJU’s once valued at $22 billion collapsed into insolvency, and Unacademy was cutting hundreds of jobs, one edtech company was quietly doing the opposite. Hiring. Expanding. Going public.
That company was PhysicsWallah.
Founded by Alakh Pandey, a teacher from Prayagraj who dropped out of engineering college, PhysicsWallah’s story is unlike almost every other startup in India’s edtech space. There was no Series A before the product. No investor deck before the revenue. Alakh used ad money from his YouTube channel where he had been posting free physics lectures since 2016 to fund the company’s early app development. His total initial investment was ₹30,000.
The model was radically simple: charge students what they can actually afford. Full-year JEE and NEET preparation courses at ₹4,000, when competitors were charging ₹1.5 lakh. Keep costs lower than revenue. Never let marketing replace the product.
The YouTube channel wasn’t separate from the business it was the business development engine. Fifteen million students discovered PhysicsWallah for free before they ever paid a rupee. That organic trust became a near-zero cost of acquisition that no funded competitor could replicate.
When co-founder Prateek Maheshwari, an IIT BHU graduate with prior startup experience, joined in 2019, he brought the operational systems and tech infrastructure Alakh couldn’t build alone. Together they launched the app during COVID-19 lockdown in May 2020. The app crashed under demand. Students waited anyway because they trusted Alakh.
In June 2022, PhysicsWallah raised its first-ever external funding: $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. By 2024, the valuation reached $2.8 billion. In November 2025, they completed a ₹3,480 crore IPO while every major edtech competitor was in crisis.
The lesson is clear profitability is a strategy, not an afterthought. Trust is a product. And free content, done right, is the most powerful distribution channel a founder can build.
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Read the full case study: PhysicsWallah Case Study
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