Bangalore headquartered BYJU’S, the world’s leading ed-tech company, recently announced its acquisition of US based Osmo, the award-winning playful learning system for creating healthy screen time experiences for US$120 million. BYJU’S first ever purchase of a US company will see Osmo continue to scale as a standalone brand as BYJU’S taps the company’s physical-to-digital technology and content to expand and enhance its current offering.

This new acquisition will bolster team BYJU’S’ international plans to innovate, explore and set new benchmarks for tech-enabled personalised learning solutions. With the integration of Osmo, BYJU’S will also look to offer a unique, customised, engaging and fun learning solution for younger kids.

Pramod Sharma, Osmo’s CEO and co-founder and his core team will continue to remain at Osmo’s helm.

The coming together of the companies is a natural fit rooted in a love of learning shared between Byju and Pramod. Both leaders reflect a complementary blend of India’s deep cultural ties to education – credited with producing top engineers and Fortune 500 CEOs – and lesson learned in Silicon Valley and US classrooms.

“We started Osmo for parents looking for a way to combine physical, hands-on play with the power of digital platforms to foster a love of learning,” says Pramod Sharma, founder – Osmo. “Finding a visionary education company like BYJU’S opened an exciting opportunity to work together to carry forward our mission across all primary school grade levels on a global scale. We’re excited about what we can accomplish together.”

At BYJU’S, the focus has always been on creating engaging and immersive content along with offering a personalised learning experience to students across grades. The company believes Osmo’s use of mixed reality interactions can take these learning experiences to new audiences and applications and expand its offering of educational content.

“We were captivated by Osmo’s physical-to-digital approach to learning and fun from our first introduction,” recalls Byju Raveendran, founder & CEO, BYJU’S –The Learning App. “Our vision is to make learning fun and engaging across age groups, across geographies. I strongly believe that using technology, we can make children all over the world fall in love with learning. Together with Osmo, we have the critical elements needed to build out an unprecedented library of engaging and entertaining educational content for a global pre-K-12 student audience. We are very excited by what we are planning to launch in the coming months.”

“With this acquisition, we are expanding into a new age demographic and entering the world of younger kids (age group 3-8). Our partnership with Osmo will help kids acquire love for learning at an early age by introducing ‘play-based learning’. Osmo’s world-class product capabilities teamed with our expertise and scale, will help build strong learning products for younger students. Overall, the BYJU’S – Osmo partnership aims at fostering love for learning through cutting-edge tech and a new approach to edutainment-based learning,” added Byju.

The company has been growing at 100 percent for the last three years, and is on target to triple it’s revenue to Rs.1400 crore this year. BYJU’S has aggressive plans for international market expansion and will continue to make big investments in technology that will help to further personalise learning for students.

Launched in 2015, BYJU’S is the world’s leading ed-tech company which offers highly-adaptive, engaging and effective learning programmes for students in classes 4-12 (K-12). For more information, visit https://byjus.com/ 

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Osmo brings physical toys into the digital world through augmented reality and its proprietary reflective artificial intelligence. To learn more, visit https://www.playosmo.com/en/.