Learning, Media and Technology

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Big EdTech

Ben Williamson

To cite this article: Ben Williamson (2022) Big EdTech, Learning, Media and Technology, 47:2,
157-162, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2063888
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LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
2022, VOL. 47, NO. 2, 157–162
https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2063888

EDITORIAL

Big EdTech

Ben Williamson
Centre for Research in Digital Education, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Billions of fans will be watching World Cup football at the end of 2022. For the first time, an edu-
cational technology company will be one of the tournament’s biggest sponsors.
The global governing body of professional football, FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football
Association), announced in March 2022 that the India-based education technology company Byju’s
is to become an ‘Official FIFA World Cup 2022™ Sponsor’. Under the deal, ‘BYJU’S will leverage its
rights to the FIFA World Cup 2022™ marks, emblem and assets, and run unique promotions to
connect with passionate football fans around the world’ (FIFA 2022). The sponsorship will put
Byju’s in the company of cryptocurrencies app Crypto.com as another key tournament sponsor,
alongside corporate FIFA sponsors Coca-Cola, Visa, and Adidas, exposing the Byju’s brand to
potentially billions of viewers during the games.
It’s not the first time Byju’s has engaged in the sports world—it already sponsors cricket in India
—but it is certainly a more globally focused campaign, which Byju’s spent a reported $30–40 million
to secure (Bhattacharya 2022). At the time of writing, the FIFA World Cup banner adorns every
regional version of the Byju’s website, just above the company’s own introduction: ‘Welcome to
the future of learning’ (byjus.com). The aims are of course admirable. As founder Byju Raveendran
said in the FIFA press release, ‘Just as football inspires billions, we at BYJU’S hope to inspire the love
of learning in every child’s life through this partnership’. But more broadly it also reveals something
about the contemporary evolution of the EdTech industry—a tendency towards being ‘big’, truly
global, and commanding huge wealth and power to exert influence on education at scale.

The emergence of Big EdTech

EdTech is not just about education, or about technology: much of it is also about business. The
Assignment Report, a monthly round-up of EdTech deals, investments, acquisitions, and market
trends, provides ample evidence that EdTech is a fast-moving multibillion dollar global industry
(https://www.theassignmentreport.com/news.htm). Behind the education sector where students
and educators interact lies a kind of shadow education industry of business managers, market fore-
casters, deal-makers, investors, venture philanthropists, and private equity firms. According to
HolonIQ, a company that tracks and forecasts the EdTech market, global spending on EdTech
will reach $404bn by 2025, with venture capital investing at pace to seize the opportunity for future
financial returns (HolonIQ 2021). It also identified that more than 30 private EdTech companies
have become ‘unicorns’ with a value of more than $1 billion US dollars, most of them reaching
this financial status after investment in 2021 (HolonIQ 2022).
Just a few of those companies, however, are ‘decacorns’ valued at more than $10bn. Facebook
(now Meta) was the first decacorn, ‘minted’ in 2007 with a valuation of $15bn before it ‘exited’
into the public stock exchanges, but in 2021 more decacorns were recorded than any previous
year on the back of huge growth in venture capital investment in technology companies (Teare

CONTACT Ben Williamson Ben.Williamson@ed.ac.uk

© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
158 EDITORIAL

2021). After a round of investment in early 2022, rumoured to be preparing for its initial public
offering, Byju’s was valued at almost $22bn, making it comfortably the most highly valued private
EdTech company on the planet, and among the top 20 private companies globally by valuation (CB
Insights 2022).
Byju’s represents what we might think of as the emergence of ‘Big EdTech’—extraordinarily
wealthy education businesses with increasingly global aspirations and power to influence education.
Of course, the global Big Tech companies, especially Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, have
long had interests in education. Google Workspace for Education and Google Classroom reach
millions of students, with Google rapidly adding new AI features and upgraded Chromebook hard-
ware to increase its presence and impact in schools. Amazon Web Services (AWS) acts as the digital
backbone to much of the EdTech industry, by providing the back-end cloud infrastructure required
by companies like Byju’s for computing power, data storage, and analytics. Microsoft and Apple
products and services are present in classrooms worldwide. Big Tech certainly has significant exist-
ing power in education, and aspirations for further expansion.
However, ‘Big EdTech’ names something different from the Big Tech operators. It refers to
natively education-focused companies that have built their business fortunes through education
itself, rather than technology companies translating their business interests and enterprise systems
into education. The rise of EdTech unicorns and decacorns, as well as the increasing size of EdTech
companies that are already listed on public stock exchanges, suggests that some distinctive trans-
formations are occurring in the education technology industry—and Learning, Media, and Technol-
ogy ought to be a forum where such changes are documented and discussed. What can Byju’s tell us
about the prospects of a Big EdTech future of education, and how can we start researching such
companies and their power?

The multibillion dollar EdTech decacorn

As a vast multibillion dollar decacorn founded only in 2011, Byju’s has built its fortune from simple
apps and video-based tutorials offered on a freemium subscription model, first in India from 2015
and expanding rapidly to other markets. The app reportedly reaches over 100 million students in
120 countries worldwide, with 7 million annual subscribers, and its World Cup sponsorship is tar-
geted at further growth in international markets (Fortune India 2022).
The subscription-based model has become highly attractive in the EdTech industry, as business-
to-business sales to schools and universities have been displaced by direct-to-consumer business
models based on the ‘on-demand’ approach of media streaming services like Netflix (Ash-Brown
2021). It’s attractive to investors too, who are able to foresee long-term earnings potential from
both customer retention and increasing subscriptions, rather than short-term sales of products
to institutions.
In this sense, Byju’s is typical of the so-called platformization of education. Not only does it act as
a new kind of infrastructure for digitalized education at scale, but its ownership and control of the
platform and its intellectual property (learning content) allows it to benefit through extracting
economic ‘rent’ payments in the form of subscriptions, making it a kind of ‘landlord’ of learning
(Sadowski 2020). It is perhaps unsurprising that an early investor in Byju’s was Mark Zuckerberg
of Facebook, through the venture philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in 2016. The model of
‘rentism’ through platforms has become a defining feature of future imaginaries of education (Mac-
gilchrist, Allert, and Bruch 2020).

Future expectations of investment returns

The astonishing scale of investment in Byju’s also indicates the extent to which EdTech investors
have increasing power and influence to shape education. Investors are of course motivated by
return on investment (ROI). But ROI is always in the future, so investments must be calculated
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 159

on the basis of a kind of ‘bet’ that a certain future will unfold. In negotiations over investment,
investors and EdTech entrepreneurs engage in the construction of what the economic sociologist
Beckert (2016) calls ‘fictional expectations’—imagined futures that justify economic action in the
present, and that investments are intended to realize. Particular imagined futures are baked into
the EdTech business model of companies like Byju’s, who claim authority over ‘the future of learn-
ing’ and potential for significant capitalization at the same time.
The mixing of imaginary futures of education and market expectations is clear in the discourse of
EdTech founders such as Byju Ravendreen, who recently said,
We continue to witness accelerated growth in India and international markets through both organic and inor-
ganic routes. Our sustained focus is on achieving our long-term goals around creating life-long value for our
learners. For that, we are imagining and reimagining the way students will learn, unlearn and relearn in the
future. Our aspiration is to build something that will last for decades. (Thathoo 2022)

The glossy and persuasive discourse here justifies and accompanies the complex quantitative finan-
cial valuation practices and exchanges of money that will determine whether this imagined future of
learning actually comes to unfold (Upadhyay and Tyagi 2022). Investors’ fictional expectations of
the future get enacted through the financial exchanges that enable new product development or
scaling up of existing services.
Investment, in other words, is a political practice, since the ‘financial imagination’ of investors
‘determines where money should go and what things should be’ (Muniesa and Doganova 2020,
110). In Byju’s case, as in the EdTech industry generally, investors get to make highly consequential
decisions about what products and services can exist or go to scale, calculations they make based on
anticipated ROI. Those products and services can then be highly consequential to the education
sector and to the learning experiences of students, regardless of whether the effects are beneficial
or not, as the market explosion in imagined Netflix-like models of on-demand, direct-to-consumer
EdTech platforms indicate.
The World Cup sponsorship exemplifies and takes to a new level this blurring of education and
finance in the EdTech industry. As one commentator on the Byju’s announcement noted,
sometimes a lot of these sponsorship deals are not just for consumers but also for investors. Being a FIFA
sponsor increases a company’s global stature … the intention is more from gaining international credibility
as a financial brand than an educational brand. (Tewari 2022)

By spending $30–40 million on World Cup sponsorship, Byju’s is making a bet on recouping the
economic costs from investors who see huge ROI prospects from future growth in subscription rent
payments from customers.

The acquisitional tendencies of Big EdTech

Part of its current mega-valuation also derives from Byju’s expanding its business far beyond the
original learning app, particularly through a variety of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships,
which are enabling it to encompass learners ‘lifelong’. As reported in The Economist (2022), in
an article entitled ‘Learnings growth: Can the edtech boom last?’, Byju’s ‘spent at least $2.8bn on
a dozen acquisitions in an apparent attempt to string together services that will allow it to reach
learners of all ages, from toddlers to career-changers’. It has extended into test preparation, higher
education, tuition centres, and bought up a variety of other platforms offering virtual reality, artifi-
cial intelligence, and educational gaming services, most of them in 2021 alone (Roy 2022). Byju’s
also has a partnership with Google Workspace to access schools in India, and with Disney for an
early years learning app designed to position it advantageously for the US market.
One challenge of such expansion is integrating the various services in a value-generating way. To
accomplish that, Byju’s relies on AWS which has helped it ‘accelerate its recent acquisitions’. As its
assistant vice president of technology has noted, ‘We have acquired a few companies, and we are
160 EDITORIAL

able to easily integrate using AWS. It’s liberating to have our business in one place’ (AWS 2021).
Like much of the EdTech industry, Byju’s does not merely have to maintain relations with investors
and customers; it is also embedded in the cloud platforms of Big Tech companies like AWS in a
complex chain of technical and economic dependencies. Those complexities are being handled
by Byju’s recent hiring of senior technical and business executives from Big Tech, including
from Amazon itself (Abrar 2022).
The ambition here is not to simply claim ownership over other EdTech platforms, as its product
development vice-president said: ‘We have been acquiring and bringing all entrepreneurs and crea-
tive forces together for a very simple reason. We will create something much larger, an ecosystem’
(Inc42 2022). This EdTech ‘ecosystem’ model, encompassing as much of lifelong learning as poss-
ible, and inspired by the Big Tech model of ceaseless expansion, suggests monopolistic market
ambitions. This potentially monopolistic tendency is reflected in the wider EdTech industry,
where mergers and acquisitions are leading to increasing concentration of power by single Big
EdTech companies.

Creating value from data rent

The final point to make about Byju’s as a prototypical Big EdTech firm is its data and AI operations.
Big Tech itself is based on the ‘rentiership’ model of extracting long-term value from the economic
rent paid for services, as well as the ‘data rent’ that is extracted from users for the generation of
additional value (Birch and Cochrane 2021). Big data extraction is at the core of the Big Tech
business model, enabled by legal arrangements which treat data as intellectual property that com-
panies own, control, and can re-use indefinitely (Sadowski, Viljoen, and Whittaker 2021).
Extracting data rent as a source of prospective value is also the aim of many companies in the
EdTech industry. As Komljenovic (2021, 324) has explained in a previous issue of Learning,
Media and Technology, ‘Data rent refers to the digital traces that students and staff leave behind
when interacting with digital platforms’, elaborating that these data:
can be made valuable by processing data into intelligence for either improving an existing product or service,
or creating a new one, selling data-based products (such as learning analytics or other data intelligence on
students), various automated matching services, automated tailored advertising, exposure to the audience,
and so on. … Options are potentially limitless. Furthermore, the more data is collected, the better for platform
owners. The premise in digital business models is to collect as much data as possible as soon as possible and
find ways to monetise it later.

The ambition of Byju’s to extract data rent as a route to monetization is exemplified by its establish-
ment in late 2021 of an AI lab in London, UK, based on its ‘vision to propel and shape the future of
education’:
A key philosophy of BYJU’S has always been that technology in education is not just about automation, but
also about harnessing it in the best way possible to empower students into becoming lifelong learners … lever-
aging cutting edge technologies such as augmented reality, AI, computer vision capabilities, gamification and
more. (Byju’s 2021)

As the company’s chief innovation and learning officer described it:

By combining the ability of computing, technology, and data, we at BYJU’S Lab, want to explore the power of
information and technology to create a more personalised, enhanced, and democratised learning. As we con-
tinue to grow and experiment, we will operate at the intersection of business and technology to make inno-
vation real and relevant for our end customers. (Byju’s 2021)

To operationalize the aspirations of Byju’s Lab, it hired an ex-Facebook executive with experience in
neural networks and generative language models, and is growing its staff of research scientists in
order ‘to push limits, create value, and create more impactful learning programmes for students
globally’ (Byju’s 2022). It is even notable that the Byju’s Lab is geographically located in the St
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 161

Pancras area of London, near to Big Tech offices of Google and YouTube, as ‘it’s a place where edu-
cation and tech easily rub shoulders’ (Lee 2021).
The Byju’s Lab illustrates several of the company’s Big Tech-like tendencies. It’s investing in big
data and AI as a route to creation of value; it’s positioning itself as an experimental and innovative
tech firm with a ‘lab’ like those where Big Tech firms incubate innovative products; and it is clearly
in the business of extracting data rent from its growing millions of users as the basis for the creation
of those value-making services and products. Having the scale and wealth to acquire other compa-
nies, make them interoperable via the cloud, and integrate all the different ‘data silos’ for maximum
value extraction appears to be goal of Big EdTech companies like Byju’s. Big, established edu-
businesses like Pearson and Blackboard have also made their bets on collecting data rent as a better
route to monetization in recent years. The platformization and datafication of education are being
imagined, invested in, and practised by companies ranging from global corporations to ambitious
startups (Hillman, Bergviken Rensfeldt, and Ivarsson 2020). Byju’s may be prototypical of the emer-
gence of Big EdTech, but similar business practices infuse much of the education technology
industry.

Researching the business models of Big EdTech

Examples like Byju’s and the growing number of EdTech unicorns suggest the analytical gaze needs
training even more precisely on the specific business models and practices of education technology
companies, and on the political, legal, and economic conditions that facilitate them. Whether Byju’s
products actually lead to beneficial outcomes for students is another matter for other forms of
research. That said, the company does not have an untarnished reputation after claims of ‘toxic’
targeting of low-income families, high-pressure sales culture, misleadingly advertising its benefits,
and exacerbating existing educational inequalities (Singh 2021). Much like the Big Tech companies
on which it is modelling itself, Byju’s is the object of fascination in the business and technology
presses, heightened expectations among investors, and generating significant controversy among
the public at the same time. FIFA and the 2022 World Cup hardly lack controversies either.
In Learning, Media and Technology we aim to stimulate critical debate about EdTech, among our
other aims. Companies of the size and ambition of Byju’s suggest the need for research that focuses
on the business models and practices of Big EdTech unicorns and decacorns, as well as on their
claims to be transformative forces in education with global-scale aims for expansion. Byju’s may
be the most visible and marketed EdTech firm on the planet when it appears as a sponsor in the
World Cup. Behind that branding, however, lies a very complex and tangled techno-economic
machinery with political power to change education, whether for better or worse, in its pursuit
of future value, market growth, and even monopoly power. We would welcome submissions to
Learning, Media and Technology that continue to untangle the business models of Big EdTech.

ORCID
Ben Williamson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9356-3213

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