The frost is beginning to thaw, and Vedantu has hit the ground running, yet again.

“We aren’t here for a sprint. We’re here for the marathon,” Vamsi Krishna told Inc42, as his beleaguered edtech startup claimed to have broken even with the protracted funding winter on the ebb.

But, is Vedantu’s turnaround a genuine scaling or simply the effect of a lower cost structure? The question is doing the rounds in the Indian edtech landscape.

From being flush with funds to the funds tap running dry – the last five years have seen the edtech sphere running into a rough patch with flagship ventures like Front Row and Udayy shutting shops, giants like BYJU’S and Lido Learning going bankrupt, and scores of smaller potential players like Crejo.Fun and Gonuts either recasting their business models to stay afloat or being gobbled up by their larger peers.

Vedantu, a late-stage startup with over $321.62 Mn funding, grappled with a loss of INR 696.2 Cr in FY22 with cash burn reaching INR 636 Cr on soaring expenses.

As its coffers went scorched, the company tightened the leash on its expenses. A year later, the expenses began plummeting, easing the cash burn to INR 372 Cr, and losses nearly halved to INR 372.6 Cr. The results were more pronounced in FY24 with the losses down to INR 157.5 Cr and the company overturning the situation by generating INR 104 Cr more cash than its expenses.

By the end of FY25, Vedantu turned profitable with INR 6 Cr in free cash flow. “The Q4 of FY25 was our strongest quarter ever. We hit INR 90 Cr in collections – a 67% YoY growth – and became profitable, generating more than INR 6 Cr in FCF, and this wasn’t even our peak quarter, which puts us on a clear trajectory to go cash flow positive in FY26,” Krishna wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The turnaround has put Vedantu on the IPO track. “It wasn’t an easy task to revive from an industry-wide downturn,” Krishna said.

But, How Did It Plug The Leaks?

“We learned from the mistakes we made when we were at our peak,” said Vamsi Krishna, who had built Vedantu with Anand Prakash and Pulkit Jain and named it as the ‘web of leanings’.

The 2014-born startup saw demand soaring when the planet reeled under the pandemic and everything came to a screeching........

© Inc42