Why Byju’s has stayed the course in educational games | Divya Gokulnath

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Divya Gokulnath and her husband Byju Raveendran — the founders of Byju’s — have put India on the map when it comes to edtech companies.

They started Byju’s in 2011 with humble roots. Now they have more than 30,000 people working for them…

I caught up with Gokulnath at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, after she gave a talk on the main stage about education, technology and new approaches to learning opened by AI.

Raveendran used to teach math offline to 25,000 students at a time in a big stadium in Bangalore, and both founders believed that digital learning could be so much more efficient. They launched their online learning products for high school students in 2015, and now they’ve taken the offline products to online learning via Osmo. In 2018, Byju’s became India’s first edtech unicorn. During the pandemic, the company had challenges with accounting issues and layoffs.

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Now the company is all-in on digital edtech games. Gokulnath said is a fan of virtual reality games which can increase engagement and visually teach kids principles about math when other methods don’t sink in. But she also sees the limits and costs of technology as a barrier that can stand in the way of progress.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What did you talk about on the main stage?

Divya Gokulnath: We spoke about what does it take to build a unicorn. I was also talking about AI and education. You cannot talk about