Physics Wallah

Timeline

1. 2014Alakh Pandey leaves an engineering course in Kanpur and starts teaching physics at coaching institutes in Allahabad, now Prayagraj.
2. 2016He launches PhysicsWallah as a YouTube channel, uploading free physics lectures for JEE, NEET and board students.
3. 2019The channel crosses about 2 million followers on the strength of the free classes.
4. 2020Pandey and Prateek Maheshwari incorporate Physics Wallah as a company and launch the PW app with paid courses priced far below established coaching.
5. June 2022The company raises about 100 million dollars from WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures at about 1.1 billion dollars, becoming a unicorn.
6. June 2022The first offline centre, Vidyapeeth, opens in Kota, Rajasthan.
7. August 2022FreeCo, a doubt solving platform, becomes the company's first acquisition.
8. October 2022PrepOnline and Altis Vortex are acquired to strengthen the NEET offering and the books business.
9. November 2022UPSC Wallah is launched for civil services aspirants, with the company earmarking about 20 million dollars for acquisitions.
10. December 2022iNeuron, an upskilling platform, is acquired from the S. Chand group, and a six episode web series on the company streams on Amazon miniTV.
11. 2023A 50 per cent stake is taken in Xylem Learning, a hybrid education platform in South India.
12. March 2023Three former teachers start the channel Sankalp Bharat and allege that the company's teaching culture and the Kota centre's value for money had declined.
13. September 2023The company reports about 50 YouTube channels, 16 online verticals and around 100 offline centres.
14. November 2023The offline network reaches 67 centres in 34 cities, and the company lays off about 150 people, under 1 per cent of its workforce, citing performance.
15. September 2024A 210 million dollar round led by Hornbill Capital values the company at about 2.8 billion dollars.
16. December 2024An MoU with the Andhra Pradesh government covers a University of Innovation, with a stated investment of up to 1,000 crore rupees.
17. May 2025The offline network is reported at about 180 centres.
18. November 2025The company raises about 3,480 crore rupees in an initial public offering and lists on the NSE and BSE at a 33 per cent premium.
19. March 2026Hello Bachhon, a Netflix series based on Alakh Pandey's life, premieres.

What it does

Physics Wallah teaches students for the entrance examinations that decide Indian engineering and medical careers. It started with free physics lectures on YouTube, added paid courses on its own app at prices a fraction of what established coaching charged, and then opened physical centres for students who want a classroom. Today the company sells three things: recorded and live classes for a long list of exams, printed books and study material, and seats at its offline centres.^[1][6]

The exams it prepares students for have widened from JEE and NEET to UPSC, Olympiads, banking and management entrance tests, and school board exams for classes 9 to 12. The company reaches students through more than a hundred YouTube channels in several Indian languages, and through an app that had been downloaded more than 10 million times on Google Play by February 2025.^[1][5]

What separates Physics Wallah from the edtech companies it was compared with is price. Its online courses have started from around 3,000 to 4,000 rupees, against the 40,000 to 1 lakh rupee range that larger brands charged for the same preparation, and the company's customer acquisition cost has stayed low because the free YouTube channel does the marketing. That single choice is the reason a company founded in 2020 reached a billion dollar valuation in two years while better funded rivals were cutting staff.^[6]

History

Physics Wallah began with one teacher. Alakh Pandey grew up in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, left an engineering course in Kanpur, and went back home to teach physics at coaching institutes. He was a theatrical teacher who mixed formulas with jokes and taught in Hindi and Hinglish, and students in small towns responded to him more than to any advertisement. In 2016 he put his classes on YouTube for free, and by 2019 the channel had about 2 million followers.^[7]

The company came later than the channel. In 2020, during the pandemic, Prateek Maheshwari, the founder of a company that built technology for education firms, called Pandey and offered to build him an app. Pandey had turned the offer down in 2018 because he was focused on YouTube. This time they agreed, incorporated Physics Wallah as a company, and launched paid courses alongside the free lectures. The two founders did not meet in person for the first nine months after incorporating the business, by which time more than 150,000 students were already studying with them.^[6]

Growth was fast and, unusually for Indian edtech, profitable. The company reported that it was profitable from inception with positive cash flows, that revenue grew about ninefold in the 2022 financial year over the previous one, and that its run rate for the 2023 financial year was about 65 million dollars. In June 2022 it raised its first institutional money, about 100 million dollars from WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures, at a valuation of about 1.1 billion dollars, and used part of it to open its first offline centre in Kota.^[2]

The next two years were spent widening the footprint. Offline centres grew from about 20 in 2022 to 67 in 34 cities by November 2023 and around 180 by May 2025, and the company bought a set of smaller businesses in doubt solving, publishing and upskilling to fill gaps in its own catalogue. A second funding round in September 2024, about 210 million dollars, took the valuation to about 2.8 billion dollars.^[3][8]

Founders and leadership

Alakh Pandey is the teacher and the face of the company. He was born in 1992, took tuitions from the time he was in class 8, dropped out of an engineering college in his third year, and returned to his hometown to teach physics. The style that made him famous on YouTube, loud, funny, sarcastic and delivered in Hinglish, is also the company's brand. Students who copied his shaved head became known as the Takla gang, a following he says he never wanted.^[7]

Prateek Maheshwari is the builder. Trained in engineering with a background in technology products, he founded PenPencil, which supplied technology to education companies, before partnering with Pandey. He has run the operating side of Physics Wallah, from the app and the data systems to the offline centres, and it was his call in 2020 that started the business at all.^[5][6]

Together the two held about 40.31 per cent of the company each before the listing, with a small holding in the hands of other individuals and the rest with investors. Both were reported to have crossed a billion dollars in personal net worth on the back of the listing, which made them, by that measure, two of the newest billionaires in Indian education.^[1]

Below the founders, the leadership has been built on domain people rather than on degrees, which the founders have described as a deliberate hiring rule. The company adds senior people through acquisitions where it can, and the founder of PrepOnline, Vivek Gaur, joined as chief growth officer as part of that deal.^[6][8]

The business model

The model rests on one number: the cost of finding a student. Physics Wallah builds communities on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook and then sells courses to the people who already follow the teacher, so it spends far less on advertising than a company that has to buy attention. The founders have said there was never a need to spend heavily on marketing and advertising, and that this is what allows the courses to stay cheap.^[6]

Cheap courses bring volume, and volume pays for the fixed cost of content. A recorded lecture, once made, can be sold to thousands of students with almost no extra cost, which is why the company could price a full NEET or JEE course at a few thousand rupees and still report profits from the start. Revenue grew about ninefold in the 2022 financial year, and the founders said in September 2024 that revenue had risen about twelvefold from 230 crore rupees in the 2022 financial year.^[2][3]

Offline centres change that arithmetic. A Vidyapeeth centre carries rent, teachers, support staff and equipment, and the company has said each centre takes about three years to turn profitable. The upside is a much higher fee per student and a product that online-only rivals struggled to offer once schools reopened after the pandemic. Nine regions had turned profitable by September 2024, and the company described that financial year as its most EBITDA profitable to that point.^[3]

Books and study material are the third leg. The company bought a publisher to build the vertical, launched its own store, and has said it wants to be the most affordable online bookstore for students preparing for entrance exams. Printed material also gives the brand a presence in towns where a paid app is still a hard sell.^[8]

Offline centres and Vidyapeeth

Vidyapeeth is the company's classroom brand. The first centre opened in Kota, Rajasthan, in June 2022, the town that had for decades been the capital of Indian entrance exam coaching. Putting a centre there was a statement: the company that had undercut the coaching industry online would now compete with it on its home ground.^[2]

The network grew quickly from that first centre. There were about 20 offline centres across 16 to 18 cities in June 2022, 67 centres in 34 cities by November 2023, and around 180 by May 2025. The company has also described offline and hybrid centres in more than 105 cities, a figure that counts smaller learning points as well as full centres.^[2][1][12]

The centres serve two purposes. They sell a higher priced product than the app, and they give the brand a physical presence in smaller cities where parents want to see a classroom before they pay. The cost is time: the company has said each centre takes about three years to turn profitable, which means the offline expansion absorbs cash for years before it returns any.^[3]

The offline push is also how Physics Wallah answered the end of the pandemic. When schools and coaching centres reopened, students who had studied online wanted classrooms again, and several online-first edtech companies lost them. Having a hybrid product let the company keep them, which is why growing the centre network became the stated use of the 2024 funding round.^[3][8]

Courses and exam categories

The core categories are the two entrance examinations that decide the most Indian careers. JEE, for admission to engineering colleges, and NEET, for medical colleges, were the first subjects on the channel and remain the largest part of the business. Around them sit school board preparation for classes 9 to 12, which brings students in earlier and keeps them through the years that matter.^[1]

The company has extended into postgraduate and professional exams deliberately. UPSC Wallah was launched in November 2022 for civil services aspirants, and the group now also runs PW OnlyIAS, Sarrthi IAS and PW MedEd for different government and medical career tracks. Olympiad preparation, banking examinations and management entrance tests have been added on the same pattern: take a category, build content, price it below the incumbents.^[5][1]

Skills and degrees are the newest additions. PW Skills sells job oriented courses in technology and data, PW School of Startups and the PW Institute of Innovation address entrepreneurship and applied learning, and the Physics Wallah Digital University and a proposed University of Innovation in Andhra Pradesh point at accredited education rather than only test preparation. The company has said it would invest up to 1,000 crore rupees in the university project with its investors.^[1][12]

Language is a strategy rather than a feature. The company has published free content across more than a hundred YouTube channels in several Indian languages, and the founders' stated aim after the first funding round was to teach in nine vernacular languages, because the students who cannot afford large coaching fees are often the ones who study in a language other than English.^[2][12]

The app, YouTube and books

The YouTube channel is the company's original product and remains its largest one. By February 2025 the main Physics Wallah channel had about 13.3 million subscribers, and the group claims to have offered free education to more than 4.6 crore students across 112 channels in five vernacular languages. Nobody pays for that content, and it is the reason the paid product has a warm audience to sell to.^[1][12]

The app is where the money is made. It carries live and recorded classes, tests, doubt solving and study material, and when it launched the first version crashed under the number of concurrent users. Prateek Maheshwari has said it took the team about 10 to 15 days to scale the technology, while students made do with recorded lectures in the meantime.^[6]

The free channel and the paid app feed each other. A student watches a lecture at no cost, buys a course when the free material runs out, and the question they are most likely to ask, whether the paid course is worth it, is answered by the teacher they already trust. That is why the company watches its net promoter score closely and describes its business as built on word of mouth.^[3]

Books complete the circle. The company acquired a publisher, opened its own store, and sells printed study material that reaches students who prefer paper or who do not have a reliable connection for streaming. It has said it wants to be the most affordable online bookstore for test preparation audiences, which is the same price argument applied to a different product.^[8]

Acquisitions and subsidiary brands

Physics Wallah started buying companies as soon as it had money to. FreeCo, a doubt solving platform, was acquired in August 2022 and was the company's first purchase. Doubt solving looks small next to a course, but it is the part of teaching that students value most in the weeks before an exam, and buying it was faster than building it.^[1][8]

Two more followed in October 2022. PrepOnline brought a NEET focused online platform and a YouTube channel with about 400,000 subscribers, which was redirected into the Physics Wallah brand, and Altis Vortex brought a publisher of exam preparation books founded in 2015. The amounts were not disclosed, and the company said at the time that it had earmarked about 20 million dollars for acquisitions that year.^[8]

The buying has continued in different directions. iNeuron, a technology upskilling platform, was acquired from the S. Chand group in December 2022 and became the base of PW Skills. A 50 per cent stake in Xylem Learning, a hybrid education platform in South India, was bought in 2023. Etoos India, Acadfly, CuriousJr, Gyaan-e and PW Store have all become part of the group's brand list, and the company has said it keeps a budget for further deals.^[1][9][12]

The strategy behind the deals has been described by the founders as acqui-hiring as much as buying products. The company looks for the leadership it lacks and the exam categories it has not yet covered, and it brings both inside its own brand rather than running the acquired company separately. Vivek Gaur, one of the founders of PrepOnline, joined Physics Wallah as chief growth officer.^[8]

Revenue and financials

The company has published few numbers and dated them clearly when it did. Revenue for the 2022 financial year was about 230 crore rupees. The founders said in June 2022 that revenue had grown about ninefold in that year and that the run rate for the 2023 financial year was about 65 million dollars, and in September 2024 Maheshwari said revenue had risen about twelvefold from that 230 crore rupee base.^[2][3]

Profit was the company's claim from the beginning. It reported being profitable from inception with positive cash flows and reserves, which is rare in Indian edtech, and the offline expansion was funded from the 2024 round rather than from operations. Management said the first two quarters of the 2024 financial year were its most profitable to that point despite the strain of opening centres.^[2][3]

The offline business is what will decide the numbers from here. Nine regions had turned profitable by September 2024, and each centre takes about three years to do so, which means the reported profit depends on how far the growth in centres runs ahead of the growth in students who pay for them. Buying reach with fee revenue is exactly how the online business avoided that problem, and the centres cannot.^[3]

The listing changed the reporting standards. As a private company Physics Wallah could choose what it disclosed; as a listed one it reports quarterly to the exchanges and files with the regulator, and its prospectus is a public document. Every figure in those filings is dated to a financial year and audited, which is a different standard of evidence from the numbers quoted in funding announcements.^[14][16]

The IPO and the listing

Physics Wallah filed its draft red herring prospectus with the market regulator in September 2025 and opened its initial public offering on 11 November 2025. The issue was priced at 103 to 109 rupees a share and raised about 3,480 crore rupees in total, made up of a fresh issue of about 3,100 crore rupees and an offer for sale of about 380 crore rupees by existing shareholders.^[16][4]

Demand was solid rather than spectacular. The offering was subscribed about 1.81 times overall, with qualified institutional buyers subscribing about 2.70 times, retail investors about 1.06 times and non institutional investors about 48 per cent of their portion. Kotak Mahindra Capital was the book running lead manager.^[4]

The listing rewarded the subscribers. Shares opened at 145 rupees on the NSE and 143.10 rupees on the BSE on 18 November 2025, a premium of 33 per cent over the issue price. The founders' holdings made them billionaires by the measure of the listing day price, and the company had moved from a YouTube channel to a public company in nine years.^[4][1]

The prospectus set out what the money was for. About 941 crore rupees were earmarked for acquisitions and about 710 crore rupees for marketing, with the rest going to lease expenses for offline centres and to cloud infrastructure. The allocation says what the company intends to buy with the listing rather than what it intends to pay off, which is unusual for an IPO in a sector that had spent three years cutting costs.^[4]

Shareholding and ownership

Before the listing, the two founders held about 40.31 per cent of the company each, which is an unusually concentrated structure for a business valued at close to three billion dollars. A small holding sat with another individual, and the institutional investors held the rest.^[1]

The institutional register was built over two rounds. WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures led the maiden round in June 2022 at a valuation of about 1.1 billion dollars, and both stayed for the second. Hornbill Capital led the September 2024 round with a significant participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners.^[2][3]

The 2024 round also let some of the company's own people convert paper gains into cash. Between about 15 and 20 per cent of that round, worth roughly 30 to 40 million dollars, was a secondary sale by management and employees rather than new money into the business. For a company whose employees had been paid partly in stock since 2022, that sale was the first real liquidity they had seen.^[3]

After the listing the shareholding is public. The founders' stakes fell by the shares sold in the offer, the venture funds hold a diluted position, and the investing public holds the rest. The concentration that surprised observers before the IPO now shows up as one of the largest founder holdings on the Indian exchanges.^[4][1]

Employees and offices

The company's head office is on a single floor address in Sector 62, Noida, in the National Capital Region, which has been its registered office since it was incorporated. That one address coordinates a network of offline centres that had grown to about 180 by May 2025 and a set of digital brands that operate from the same corporate centre.^[1]

The workforce has grown and then been pruned. In June 2022 the company had about 1,900 employees, including around 500 teachers, about 90 to 100 technology specialists, 200 associate teachers answering student doubts and another 200 people writing questions and test papers. By November 2023 the company laid off about 150 people, under 1 per cent of its workforce, citing performance, and reports around the same period put the number at about 120. Both rounds were small next to the cuts at larger edtech firms.^[2][10][1]

The teaching workforce is the company's real asset and its main cost. Physics Wallah's brand rests on individual teachers who students follow, and when three of them left in 2023 and started their own channel, the company's response showed how much of the business lives in those relationships. Hiring and keeping teachers is a different problem from hiring engineers.^[1]

The centre network spreads the staff across the country. Kota, where Vidyapeeth began, remains the best known location, and the expansion into South India through Xylem and the Andhra Pradesh university project has moved a growing share of the workforce outside the northern belt where the brand started.^[1][12]

Competition

Physics Wallah's main rivals in test preparation are Unacademy, Vedantu, Byju's and Infinity Learn, the companies that were in the sector before it and, in most cases, raised far more money. Its advantage has been price and its disadvantage has been size: a full page of advertising from a competitor costs more than the company's entire marketing budget in a month.^[1]

The comparison that matters most is Byju's. The two companies were both built by teachers turned entrepreneurs on the promise of making Indian education better, and Byju's collapsed under debt and governance failures while Physics Wallah listed on the stock exchange. The lesson the market has taken from the pair is that a low price with low customer acquisition cost survives a funding winter that a high price with expensive marketing does not.^[3][6]

In the offline market the competition is older and more local. Kota's established institutes charge several times what a Vidyapeeth centre does, and they have decades of results to point at. Physics Wallah's answer is price and brand recognition from YouTube, which reaches students in towns where those institutes have no presence at all.^[1][6]

The list of competitors now includes non profit and government options. Free content has grown across the internet, and the National Testing Agency's own material is free to every student, so the paid product has to be better than what a determined student can find at no cost. That is the pressure that keeps the company's prices where they are.^[1]

There is also competition inside the company's own market from its former employees. Teachers who leave Physics Wallah can take their following with them, because the audience follows the person and not the logo, and the 2023 dispute showed how quickly a group of them can build a rival channel. The company's defence is its content library, its test material and its distribution, none of which a single teacher can replicate alone.^[1][6]

Controversies and criticism

The most serious public criticism has come from its own teachers. In March 2023 several teachers who had left Physics Wallah started an independent YouTube channel called Sankalp Bharat and said in a video that the company's culture had changed and that the vision they had joined for no longer existed. They also alleged that students at the Kota centre were not getting an education that justified the fee being charged.^[1]

The company's side of the dispute was argued by another of its teachers, Pankaj Sijariya, who said in a video that the three former teachers, Tarun Kumar, Manish Dubey and Sarvesh Dixit, had each been offered about 5 crore rupees to resign and join the rival platform Adda247. The three denied accepting payments and said they had been accused of taking bribes. Physics Wallah declined to comment on the validity of the claims and told Business Today that the episode was a distraction.^[1]

Layoffs brought a second round of attention. In November 2023 about 150 employees, roughly 0.8 per cent of the workforce, were asked to leave on performance grounds, and reports at the same time described about 120 people being let go after an evaluation. The company's position was that this was routine performance management rather than a retrenchment, and it was small compared to the thousands of jobs cut at Unacademy and Byju's.^[1][10]

A third theme is the gap between the free brand and the paid product. Students who arrive through a free YouTube class sometimes find that the course they want costs more than they expected, or that the teacher they followed has moved. It is the ordinary tension of a business built on a following, and it is the reason the company tracks its net promoter score as a headline metric rather than a footnote.^[3][6]

In popular culture

Physics Wallah's story was told on screen before it was even five years old. A six episode web series titled Physics Wallah, on the life of Alakh Pandey and the company, was released on Amazon miniTV on 15 December 2022, created, directed and produced by Abhishek Dhandharia under his production house About Films, with Shreedhar Dubey playing the lead.^[13][1]

A second series followed a few years later. Hello Bachhon, produced by The Viral Fever with Vineet Kumar Singh in the role based on Pandey, premiered on Netflix on 6 March 2026. Reviews were mixed, with The Hindu describing the lead performance as earnest but the series as thin, which is a fair summary of how difficult it is to make a company's origin story into drama.^[14][1]

The screen versions matter commercially as well as culturally. A Netflix series is marketing that a company of this size could never buy, and it does it in exactly the audience the company wants, students and their parents. Pandey's own following, which began as a YouTube channel, is what made him a character worth filming in the first place.^[7]

Reading the numbers

Physics Wallah is best read as a low price business with a low cost of finding customers. Revenue of about 230 crore rupees in the 2022 financial year, a ninefold growth rate in that year and a reported twelvefold rise by September 2024 all come from the same engine: free classes build the audience, the app sells to it, and almost nothing is spent on advertising to get there.^[2][3]

The offline network is where that engine is tested. A centre has rent and salaries whether or not students enrol, and the company has said each one takes about three years to turn profitable. So the number to watch is not how many centres have opened but how many have aged past three years, because that is the point at which the offline half of the business stops consuming the profit the online half makes.^[3]

The listing gives the clearest numbers of all. A 3,480 crore rupee issue, about 941 crore rupees set aside for acquisitions and about 710 crore rupees for marketing, is a statement that the next phase of growth will be bought rather than grown. For a company built on word of mouth, that is a departure, and it is the one to hold management to.^[4]

The founders still own about 40 per cent each before the offer, which keeps decisions in their hands. It also means the company's direction remains tied to two people, one of whom is the most famous teacher in India. That is the risk and the asset in the same sentence, and no financial ratio captures it.^[1]

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