PhysicsWallah: The Teacher from Prayagraj Who Built a Billion Dollar Classroom

The Problem

In India, cracking JEE or NEET is everything for millions of students who want to become engineers or doctors. The preparation is intense, starts early, and costs a lot.

Coaching institutes in cities like Kota, Hyderabad, and Delhi charge anywhere from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh per year. For a family in a small town in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, that kind of money is simply out of reach. So the students from those towns either stretched their families financially, studied alone with no guidance, or gave up on the dream entirely.

The system was not broken. It was just built for the wrong people.

Alakh Pandey was born in 1991 in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. His family did not have much. At one point, they had to sell their house just to keep things going. His father sold oil from a bicycle. There were no safety nets, no backup plans.

Alakh was not an exceptional student in the traditional sense. He wanted to be an actor as a child. Mathematics was his weakest subject. He was, by his own admission, a below-average kid in school.

But there was one thing he could do: explain things in a way that made people understand.

By the time he was in the 9th grade, he was already tutoring younger kids to contribute to the family income. By the time he was in the 11th grade, he was teaching at local coaching institutes. He was not doing it to build a brand. He was doing it because his family needed the money.

He eventually enrolled in mechanical engineering at Harcourt Butler Technical University in Kanpur. He never completed his degree. The pull of teaching was stronger, and at some point, he made a decision that his family did not fully support: he would become a full-time teacher.

For a few years, Alakh taught at coaching institutes in Allahabad. He was good at it. Students loved his style, which was raw, energetic, and deeply relatable. He did not talk down to students. He talked like someone who had sat exactly where they were sitting.

But he kept hitting the same wall. The classroom could hold only so many students. The reach was limited. Every batch he taught was a drop in the ocean compared to the millions of students outside, who had no access to anyone like him.

In 2016, he decided to do something about it.

The channel did not blow up overnight. In the first year, it reached about 10,000 subscribers. Not bad, but not viral either. Alakh kept posting. He answered doubts in the comment section himself. He ran live sessions. He adjusted based on what students asked for.

Then he noticed something. Students preparing for ICSE board exams were struggling with specific topics that most YouTube channels ignored. He shifted some of his content to fill that gap. Subscribers started climbing. The community started building itself around his teaching.

By 2019, the channel had grown significantly. But Alakh was running it mostly alone, and he knew he could not scale it by himself.

In 2019, Alakh met Prateek Maheshwari.

Prateek was an IIT BHU graduate who had already built and run startups before. He understood product, technology, and how to build organizations. He was, in almost every way, the operational complement to Alakh's teaching instinct.

After a few meetings, they decided to build together. Alakh himself has said that without Prateek, the company would not be what it is today. Prateek built the app, introduced systems and processes, and taught Alakh how to think about building an organization instead of just a channel.

This is one of the most overlooked parts of the PhysicsWallah story. The teaching was always there. The business only happened when the right partner arrived.

In May 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown, PhysicsWallah launched its Android app.

The idea was to offer online courses for JEE and NEET at prices no one else was offering. Full-year courses for Rs 4,000, at a time when competitors were charging Rs 1.5 lakh for the same duration.

The response was immediate and overwhelming. More than 35,000 students signed up within the first few days. Then the app crashed under the traffic. Students who had paid could not access their classes. For a brand that had built everything on trust, this was a crisis.

The technical issues took weeks to fix. Most startups would have lost their audience. PhysicsWallah did not.

This is the chapter that makes PhysicsWallah genuinely unusual in the Indian startup world.

While BYJU's was raising billions and spending even more, while Unacademy was burning cash on marketing campaigns and celebrity endorsements, PhysicsWallah was building quietly and actually making money.

Alakh used the ad revenue from his YouTube channel to fund the initial app development, around Rs 15 lakh of his own money. There was no Series A before the product. No investor deck before the revenue.

The reason was simple. PhysicsWallah never competed on spending. They competed on trust and price. Their cost of customer acquisition was low because Alakh's YouTube channel had been pulling students in for free for years. And because their courses were affordable, the volume of students made up for the low price per student.

For years, PhysicsWallah ran without any outside funding at all. Then in June 2022, they raised $100 million from WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures.

The valuation: $1.1 billion.

Alakh later said that not getting funding early was actually a good thing. It forced him to learn every part of the business himself. He understood operations, content, student experience, and community because he had done all of it before anyone else was doing it for him.

By 2023 and 2024, India's edtech sector was in deep trouble.

BYJU's, once valued at $22 billion and the most funded edtech company in the world, collapsed into insolvency proceedings. Unacademy was cutting staff. More than 2,000 small edtech ventures had quietly shut down.

PhysicsWallah was doing the opposite. It was expanding offline, opening coaching centres called PW Vidyapeeth across India. It was launching courses for UPSC, state boards, and newer segments. It was hiring, not firing.

Other edtech companies spent heavily on ads to acquire students. When the money ran out, the students left. PhysicsWallah's students came because Alakh was on YouTube being himself, for free, every week. That audience did not go anywhere.

What You Can Take Away From This

The Numbers