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Veranda Learning Solutions Ltd, the Chennai-based education technology company founded in 2018 by the Kalpathi AGS Group, has over the years grown mainly through acquisitions. For instance, in May 2023, it acquired seven companies valued at ₹400 crore. The total number of students trained by the Veranda Group for FY24 stood at 6,93,874. The company’s Executive Director and Chairman Suresh Kalpathi says there is scope for more acquisitions. In this interview, he talks about the sectors where acquisition is possible, and the financial roadmap for the current fiscal. Excerpts.
Looks like Veranda now has a broad spectrum in the education space?
We divide ourselves into possibly three parts. One is what we call academic formal education; test prep and training. On the academic side, we do manage K-12 schools. We manage an international school. We manage about 8 to 10 colleges which do B.Com, BBA, BSMS. On the test prep side, we do commerce coaching under the brand of JK Shah classes. We do State, Central government exams under the brand of Veranda Race. We do software education under the brand of Edureka and we work with many of the IITs, IIMs, Purdues of the World, Cambridges of the world to deliver certification diploma degree programmes jointly with them.
The acquisition of the 15-year-old coaching institution Race in 2020 is an interesting turnaround story, right?
It was one of the businesses that we acquired. It used to be called Chennai Race and they were largely into offline education. Fantastic results and a ten-year-old entity. But I think when Covid came they were not sort of ready for it. So a lot of the physical locations got shut down. So we set up studios in one of the facilities; set up ten studios, built them out at record speed and involved some people from our production business to speed things up and got them launched as an online program under the brand of Veranda Race. As Covid slowly started retreating, we went back, opened up a lot of the online centres and built them out. So a business that almost went down to doing ₹20-30 lakh a month at the peak of Covid, this year is expected to deliver as a whole about ₹150 crore. Our acquisition cost was very little, but we were at the right time and a great deal.
Any new sector in the education sector that interests you to acquire?
One of them is a pre-school because it feeds into a system we are already building. The other one is study abroad because a lot of students who we have today, the aspiration to go abroad is pretty significant. So over the last 40 years, you can see the change. It’s symptomatic of how India has moved. Affordability, affluence has gone up. There are more people, not just NBFC even banks have come forward to provide loans for people who are going abroad to study. The awareness is significantly gone up.
How is this fiscal going to be for you ?
We see ourselves at a minimum going towards about ₹550 crore of topline. There are a few things that we are working on. If some of them should turn out well, it could add to ₹600 crore.
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