Vedantu takes majority stake in test prep provider Deeksha for $40 million

Vedantu, an Indian online tutoring company for school students, acquired a majority stake in Deeksha, a test preparation provider, for $40 million. The deal was reported on October 13, 2022.

Deeksha, operated by Ace Creative Learning, was founded in 1998 and coaches students in grades 9 to 12 for school board and competitive entrance examinations. According to YourStory, it ran 39 centers in the southern states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and the transaction added roughly 13,000 students to Vedantu's base. Vedantu said it planned to bring its technology into Deeksha's classrooms and use the combined operation to build a hybrid model that mixes online and in-person teaching, with an emphasis on smaller towns.

Vedantu, whose investors include Tiger Global, focuses on education for school students from kindergarten to grade 12. The Deeksha deal followed two earlier purchases: the doubt-solving app Instasolv in February 2021 and Pedagogy, an Ahmedabad-based education technology startup, in July 2021. Vedantu had opened its first hybrid learning center, in the city of Muzaffarpur, earlier in 2022. The company has said that online offerings combined reach less than 5 percent of the school education market.