WhiteHat Jr: advertisement and communication through an ethical lens

Abstract

The Indian ed-tech story is nothing less than an exciting thriller. While businesses across industries have struggled due to the pandemic-induced lockdowns, the ed-tech sector has grown strength-to-strength. National lockdowns, which led to 1.3 million schools and 14,000 colleges being shut, have encouraged the students to find respite online. These students have now become the target segment for over 4,000 ed-tech startups currently present in India. The top ones like Byju's, Vedantu, and Unacademy are, in fact, consolidating their position by acquiring smaller niche businesses and promising startups. This, in turn, is helping them shore up more and more rounds of funding. Byju's is currently valued at around $11 billion, while Unacademy's latest valuation was around $2 billion. Vedantu also doubled its valuation to $600 million in 2020. We can clearly see who is winning the valuation game. WhiteHat Jr, founded in 2018 by Karan Bajaj, is an online platform for teaching coding to school-going children. In September 2019, it was valued at $30 million and had been able to raise $10 million in that funding round. In less than a year, Byju's acquired WhiteHat Jr in a $300 million all-cash deal. It is being said that this might have been Byju's bid to spread its wings in international markets. The ed-tech sector in India is cutthroat. The fight to get more and more users faster than the others has pushed companies into aggressive sales techniques and some arguably shady advertisement practices.