Who is Karan Bajaj, who sold his 18-month-old Startup WhiteHat Jr to BYJU'S for $ 300 Million By Samrat Pradhan

Who is Karan Bajaj, who sold his 18-month-old Startup WhiteHat Jr to BYJU'S for $ 300 Million

Samrat Pradhan | Friday, 07 August 2020, 14:10 IST

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Who is Karan Bajaj, who sold his 18-month-old startup WhiteHat Jr to BYJU'S for USD 300 Million

Karan Bajaj has now become the highlight in the startup ecosystem after selling his startup WhiteHat Jr. He sold it to Byjus for USD 300 million, hence making it the biggest deal so far in India’s ed-tech segment. Bajaj’s WhiteHat is an online coding platform which is targeted towards kids from 1 to 14 years of age. Being just a 20 months old company, it has only raised USD 11 million  so far and has remained positive for almost five months now. As Bajaj owns about 40 percent share in it, Karan Bajaj has become a multi-millionaire after this deal. And the most important factor is that the startup achieved an annual run rate of USD 150 million in the span of just 18 months. 

During an interview Karan Bajaj said  “Let me just say for any entrepreneur the first question you ask is, if the product is valuable, how do you get it to millions of users- how can more users use the product- with Byjus that vision would come to life in a much faster-accelerated way than going on my own. I barely met Byjus six weeks ago and found the same sense of boundaryless global vision. We have an uninhibited global view as Byju’s would give me the independence to operate. I would be able to learn from their ed-tech expertise.. everything that we wanted to accomplish.”

A Career Worth Mentioning

If we further talk about Karan, he is an Indian-American entrepreneur  who was born into an army family on 30th June 1979. While growing up, Karan lived in different parts of India. He is an author, yogi and the founder of the edu-tech startup WhiteHat Jr. Furthermore, he has also published three contemporary Indian novels under his name till now.

Karan is currently based out of the US, and has a diverse professional portfolio. He is a BITS, Mesra graduate and an alumnus of IIM Bangalore as well. He was also the South Asia head of Discovery Networks and has also worked as a Chief Marketing Officer at Aden & Anais in New York. Living in a yogic ashram for a year, he also happens to be a certified yoga teacher .

Ready from the Get-go

He hatched the idea for his startup in the year 2018 and also had the seed funding in place. And from February 2019, Karan has also been a full-time employee at WhiteHat Jr. This venture was started based out of Mumbai with an aim to teach coding to young kids, help them learn to program and encourage them to create games, animations and applications.

By last year (2019), WhiteHat Jr had made the user-base of 150,000 students and 3000 teachers. 10,000 classes were held in a day. In 2020, WhiteHat Jr increased its users more than twice with 400,000 students that were actively using the platform. 

Karan decided to hand things over and take a back seat just when the business really began to grow. Today, Karan made history by signing off one of the biggest acquisitions to BYJU’s at USD 300 million.

 

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