Chennai-headquartered edtech company Veranda Learning Solutions Limited (“Veranda”), on Monday, signed a definitive agreement to acquire test prep firm T.I.M.E for Rs 287 crore.
This 100-percent acquisition will be undertaken in a phased manner, with 80 percent of the outstanding capital along with management control in Phase 1, followed by the purchase of the remaining 20 percent at the end of two years (subject to the fulfilment of closing conditions), said the company.
Commenting on the deal, Kalpathi Suresh, Executive Director-Chairman, Veranda, said, “The acquisition of T.I.M.E. allows Veranda to expand its national footprint with an asset that has known to have sent around 50 percent of all students admitted into the IIMs. T.I.M.E. also gets to leverage Veranda’s core-engineering skills to make it the best in hybrid offering.”
He added that this acquisition will also allow Veranda to diversify into the pre-school segment via T.I.M.E. Kids which operates through 222 pre-schools across 56 cities, as well as the language training space via T.I.M.E.’s subsidiary Amoha Education that provides training in spoken English.
Manek Daruvala, Founder & Director, T.I.M.E., said, “We are delighted to be partnering with Veranda on the journey ahead that T.I.M.E. will be undertaking. We are confident that this will be a synergistic relationship and that much benefit will accrue to both partners. More importantly, we believe that it will also help us provide an even better product offering to our students.”
Established in 1992, test prep institute T.I.M.E. has a pan-India presence, operating 188 centres including franchisees spread across 98 cities in India. One of India’s leading MBA test-prep institutes, it claims to have had 37,000 unique test takers for its flagship online CAT test series AIMCAT, and says it has trained around 22 lakh students since its inception with a run rate of training almost 1.1 lakh students every year.
Hyderabad-headquartered T.I.M.E. offers training programmes for national and state-level entrance exams like CAT, MAT, CMAT, CLAT, IIT Foundation, JEE mains and advanced, NEET, IPM, BBA, CUET, GATE, Bank PO, SSC, State-level admission exams and international exams like GMAT, GRE, IELTS and TOEFL including campus recruitment training.
Viswanath Pillutla, Founder & Director, T.I.M.E., said, “Over the years, T.I.M.E. has developed a very solid reputation for offering high quality, result-orientated coaching. We are sure that this partnership will only go much further in enhancing that reputation and providing students with ever-better value for money.”
Founded in 2018, publicly-listed edtech entity Veranda Learning Solutions offers training programmes for competitive exam preparation, including State Public Service Commission, banking, insurance, railways, IAS and CA, as well as a slew of professional skilling and upskilling programmes in trending technologies.
