Prosus has not lost its appetite for edtech, despite Byju’s

Bengaluru: Despite its over $500 million investment in the controversial edtech firm Byju’s, the Dutch venture capitalist, Prosus, remains bullish on the sector, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence.   

“Investments we did in the last few years had a negative return, we lost money but we're not going to be less bold or to take less risks because of that. We just learned that sometimes technology is not ready for the future we predicted,” its Chief Executive Officer Fabricio Bloisi said at the company’s flagship event in Bengaluru on Thursday. 

Presently, the company has over 30 Indian startups in its kitty, with five of them ready for an initial public offering (IPO). He refused to name the companies, though. However, reports suggest companies like Meesho, Urban Company, BlueStone, and PayU are among those planning to file papers in the next 12-25 months.

Speaking at the event on the untapped market opportunity before Indian startups, especially those into e-commerce, which haven’t penetrated beyond the creamy layer of metro and tier-1 city consumers, Bengaluru-headquartered online shopping platform,  Meesho’s Chief Vidit Aatrey said,  “I think there can be a lot more done on how you solve for the next 500 million people. I would say to someone who wants to start a consumer or online commerce business, there's still a large white space available.” 

On a different score, reward-based credit card payments app, Cred’s Kunal Shah pointed out that India has a unique problem of workshipping its startup founders like Gods and then drowning them if something goes wrong. “We should treat them like humans who will make a lot of mistakes and look at them for 20-30 years and see if they're going to make it or not,” he urged.