Blackstone to acquire majority stake in Simplilearn for $250 mn
Mumbai: American private equity firm Blackstone on Monday said it is acquiring a 70 per cent stake in online learning platform Simplilearn Solutions for USD 250 million (about Rs 1,860 crore).
In a joint statement, Blackstone said private equity funds managed by it have entered into a definitive agreement to buy out the existing investors — Kalaari Capital, Helion Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund, who collectively own 60 per cent of Simplilearn.
Simplilearn founder and chief executive Krishna Kumar told PTI that Blackstone is investing USD 250 million in the company and previous investors — Kalaari Capital, Helion Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund — are exiting the firm.
Sources told PTI that the deal will provide an exit to the existing investors by buying out their 60 per cent stake and also picking up an additional 10 per cent from promoters and other management personnel, and values the San Francisco- and Bengaluru-based company at USD 400 million.
Blackstone already has a long list of investments in the country’s educational space, including in Byju’s, Aakash Educational Services, Ascend Learning, Ellucian and Articulate – the SaaS-based training and development platform for companies.
This is a first for Blackstone where it will have management control and majority equity.
However, Kumar said he will continue to run the company.
Simplilearn was founded in 2010 by Kumar and has since trained over 2 million professionals across the world, making it the world’s largest Bootcamp for digital skilling that helps them acquire higher skills.
The company was backed by venture capital investors such as Kalaari Capital, Helion Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund.
Announcing the deal, Amit Dixit, Blackstone Asia head, said: “This is our first private equity investment in Asia in a consumer technology company wherein we own the majority of the equity”.
Like many other sectors, technology is disrupting education and edutech has been a high conviction theme for Blackstone in India and globally, he said, adding Simplilearn is a differentiated player in the digital skilling space with premium content created in partnership with marquee universities and industry partners.
Dixit said the company is keen to accelerate growth and build Simplilearn to be the world’s pre-eminent digital learning company.
We believe Blackstone can add significant value to us because of their scale, commitment to building businesses, and global network, which will enable us to develop partnerships with universities and businesses as we continue to expand around the world in the pandemic-hit world that has only accelerated the need for digital skills, Kumar said.
Simplilearn has demonstrated strong, profitable growth and we want to turbocharge that growth through focused investments in technology, leveraging our global network and expertise in education technology and bringing to bear our relationships with global universities and enterprises, Mukesh Mehta, a senior managing director at Blackstone, said.
Simplilearn, which has been profitable for the fourth year in a row, provides outcome-based online training in over 100 programmes, helping early to mid-career professionals acquire new-age digital skills across cloud, DevOps, data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital marketing, cybersecurity, among others.
The platform offers these programmes in partnerships with top global and domestic universities, and enterprises to help them get the best of academic and industry exposure, and over 2 million such professionals have been trained globally.
It collaborates with institutes like IIT Kanpur, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, University of Massachusetts, Isenberg School of Management, Caltech CTME, Purdue Online, and Jagdish Sheth School of Management among others, while its corporate clients include IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and KPMG.
Blackstone is one of the world’s largest investment firms with over USD 649 billion in assets under management under its diverse investment vehicles that include private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, life sciences, growth equity, and opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, apart from real assets and secondary funds.
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