An 8-year-old Los Altos startup that gamifies coding education has been acquired by an India-based online education business at a reported price of $200 million.
Tynker, whose legal name is Neuron Fuel Inc., had only raised about $10 million in seed and Series A funding, according to PitchBook Data. Its backers include Felicis Ventures and Cervin Ventures.
The company declined to confirm the $200 million price that TechCrunch said was paid by Think and Learn Private Ltd., which does business as Byju's and is backed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife's philanthropy.
Tynker uses robots, drones and other fun tools to help K-12 students visualize complex concepts. It teamed up several years ago with toy giant Mattel Inc. on a line of Barbie dolls, creating coding experiences for the toys that taught logic, problem-solving and the building blocks of coding.
The startup says it has 60 million students on its platform and that it has also teamed up with BBC Learning, Google, Microsoft and NASA. It claims a presence in over 100,000 schools across 150 nations.
Co-founders Krishna Vedati, Srinivas Mandyam and Kelvin Chong — who are all parents themselves — will remain in their roles.
"Joining forces with Tynker will unlock the ability for us to bring imagination to life for hundreds of millions of students through coding," Byju's CEO Byju Raveendran said in the deal announcement. "Our goal is to ignite a love for programming in children globally and we feel strongly that Tynker's creative coding platform and approach to making programming fun and intuitive for kids will get us there even faster."
This is the third Silicon Valley startup that Byju's has bought in recent years. It bought Redwood City-based Epic Creations Inc., which offers e-books for kids, in July for $500 million. Two years ago, it bought Osmo, a Palo Alto-based augmented reality education startup whose legal name was Tangible Play Inc., for $120 million.
