PhysicsWallah puts South India at the centre of its next phase
PhysicsWallah founder Alakh Pandey plans a two-year South India expansion, targeting five states through local partnerships, multilingual learning and a broader education offering.
Edtech firm PhysicsWallah (PW) is putting South India at the centre of a two-year expansion led personally by founder and CEO Alakh Pandey.
The move matters as the company is trying to take a model built around low-cost digital teaching, physical centres and hybrid learning into markets where language, local academic preferences and established coaching networks can be different.
“For the next 24 months, my life will be dedicated to students in South India, and I will be stationed here,” Pandey said at an event in Tirupati. He said the focus would cover Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.
The immediate step is a five-year partnership with Mohan Babu University in Tirupati. According to the company, it will provide online AI, skilling and career-focused courses to nearly eighteen thousand students. The partnership broadens the South India strategy beyond entrance-exam coaching towards university learning and employability.
“Through our platform, I want to provide them the tools required to realise their potential. Since PW’s inception until today, I feel we need to create a more measurable impact in the southern part of our country,” he said.
That ambition comes after a rapid expansion of the company itself. PW began as a YouTube teaching channel in 2014 and was founded as a company in 2020 by Pandey and Prateek Maheshwari. It now spans online, offline and hybrid formats and multiple education segments.
The company said it has reached more than four crore students since inception and had more than half a crore paid students in FY26. Its app had recorded nearly nine crore cumulative downloads by FY26. The company listed on the NSE and BSE in November 2025.
Across India’s test-preparation sector, providers have been moving beyond traditional coaching hubs into Tier-II and III cities. Online-first companies have also built physical classroom networks.
PW said in its Q2 FY26 shareholder letter that it had more than twenty centres in Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru and planned thirteen additional centres across five southern states.
The wider policy environment also supports digital and multilingual delivery, although it does not guarantee commercial success. The National Education Policy calls for education technology and digital content in major Indian languages, while the government’s DIKSHA platform supports learning content in eighteen languages, including Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.