New Delhi, January 6, 2020: Aakash Educational Services Limited (“AESL”), the national leader in test preparation services, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Info Edge (India) Limited and other selling shareholders to acquire Applect Learning Systems Private Limited (“ALSPL”, or “Meritnation”), a leading ed-tech company catering to K12 students. ALSPL markets its offerings under the brand name ‘Meritnation’.

 

In October 2019, AESL partnered with Blackstone to create India’s largest digitally enabled, omni-channel test preparation company, by growing its large digital business to supplement its strong physical network of 200 centres. As part of this strategy, AESL plans to acquire Meritnation to accelerate the growth of its online live tutoring business and continues to evaluate potential acquisition opportunities.

 

Mr. Aakash Chaudhry, Director and CEO of AESL, said:“ Addition of Meritnation in Aakash family will help significantly accelerate the growth of AESL’s digital business. Apart from being one of the largest offline players, AESL is also one of the largest online live tutoring players in India today. Meritnation’s decade long EdTech experience and leadership in live tutoring technology, will further strengthen AESL’s competitive positioning not only in digital education but will also further enable its offline student offering across its 200 classroom centres, teaching over 2,50,000 students. Meritnation has built a strong team under the leadership of Pavan Chauhan, which will be a great addition to the AESL digital team. We are continuing to evaluate several acquisition opportunities in the ed-tech space as part of our digital growth strategy, so that we can make our well-crafted student performance journey more productive.”

 

Juris Corp acted as advisors to sellers and their affiliates. KPMG and Trilegal acted as advisors to AESL.