Education technology platform PhysicsWallah expects to achieve profit after tax (PAT) profitability in FY27 as higher enrollments, improving operating leverage and growing use of artificial intelligence tools support margin expansion, co-founder Prateek Maheshwari said.
Speaking to FE after the company reported a 51% year-on-year rise in consolidated revenue for the fourth quarter of FY26 to Rs 919 crore, while net loss narrowed to Rs 75 crore from Rs 293 crore a year earlier. Ebitda turned positive at Rs 29 crore against an Ebitda loss of Rs 229 crore in the year-ago quarter.
For the full year, operating revenue rose 35% to Rs 3,900 crore, while net loss narrowed sharply to Rs 24 crore from Rs 243 crore in FY25. Ebida more than doubled to Rs 549 crore from Rs 193 crore in the previous year.
“We are very confident of achieving PAT-level profitability next year,” Maheshwari said.
Maheshwari attributed the company’s growth to higher enrollments and better monetisation. He said enrollments grew around 20% while average revenue per user (Arpu) increased by more than 10%.
He said PhysicsWallah’s online business benefits from operating leverage, with incremental users contributing more directly to profitability.
“Additional students are not just additional revenue, they are additional profits,” Maheshwari said, adding that marketing expenses fell to 9% of revenue, although employee costs remained elevated due to continued investments in offline expansion.
The company’s offline network nearly doubled to 353 centres during the year. Maheshwari said the decline in offline Arpu reflected a higher contribution from shorter-duration programmes such as crash courses and government examination preparation offerings rather than weaker pricing.
“If you compare full-year courses on an apple-to-apple basis, there is a 6-9% improvement in Arpu at a blended level,” he said.
He added that PhysicsWallah was targeting full-year profitability for the offline business in FY27 after improving segment Ebitda margins by 9 percentage points to negative 10%.
Maheshwari also pointed to AI-led efficiencies as a key driver of future margins. He said more than 100 million student doubt queries had been handled through AI systems.
According to him, solving a student query through AI costs around Rs 2 compared with Rs 80 through human intervention, while subjective answer sheet evaluation costs less than Rs 7 compared with around Rs 150 manually.
