Indian education technology startup Physics Wallah announced on Friday that it had raised $210 million as it looks to expand its business, in part via acquisitions, amid troubles in the sector.

The funding, led by Hornbill Capital, and involving Lightspeed Venture Partners, GSV and WestBridge, values the company at $2.8 billion, a significant increase from its last valuation of $1.1 billion.

Physics Wallah, founded in 2020, is one of India’s many education technology, or ed-tech firms, that offers free and paid-for courses for various competitive examinations in India. The company aims to differentiate itself by offering courses that on average cost less than $50, in order to be accessible to more kids in poorer parts of the country.

“We are not built for 1% of the country or 1% of the world, we are built for the remaining 99%, those who cannot go to these fancy coaching classes … now we enable different kinds of students,” Alakh Pandey, CEO of Physics Wallah, told CNBC in an interview.

The company runs on a freemium business model, hosting courses for free on YouTube. For those students who want more features such as homework and tests, there is a paid offering.

The company said its revenue grew 250% year-on-year in the fiscal year ended March 2024 and Pandey said he expects the “highest absolute” EBITDA in the current fiscal year. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or EBITDA, is one measure of profitability used by companies.

Pandey said the company is open to acquisitions provided it gives them access to new content and users.

“Consolidation, we are open to it if it’s based on different geography that we cannot serve to, and if it caters to content and community first,” Pandey said.

The CEO pointed to the equity investments it has already made. Last year, Physics Wallah brought a 50% stake in Xylem Learning, an ed-tech company headquartered in Kerala in south India.

But that expansion also led to some high-profile collapses in the sector, including ed-tech firm Byju — once valued at $22 billion — which has all but collapsed and is facing multiple insolvency proceedings in India. Its fall has been attributed to factors including aggressive acquisitions, high spend on marketing and mismanagement.

Discussing some of the failures in the ed-tech sector in India, Pandey said his company is focused on the content it offers and the outcomes for students.

“If you see interviews or even read the headlines of previous actors that you’re talking about, all they talk about is the crazy valuation they have, the funds they have raised how much money they have made,” Pandey told CNBC.

“Education is different thing. It’s not like any other startup that you can grow and talk about crazy valuation … at heart you have to accept that you are actually working to change the life of students.”

Maheshwari, who also spoke to CNBC, said that despite the failures, the market is still growing.

“I don’t believe the market has shrunk. A couple of players have struggled to perform post-Covid … but the learners are increasing year-on-year,” Maheshwari said.

Speaking about Physics Wallah’s future, Pandey said an initial public offering will happen, but wouldn’t be drawn on a timeline.

“An IPO is something that we will do. We want to have a strong governance in the company, we are working on that, forming a board of independent directors … it’s not that important for us when the IPO will happen, we are running the company like a public company,” Pandey said.

Investors poured into tech stocks at one of the fastest clips of the year a day after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate for the first time since 2020.

Led by a 7.4% gain in shares of Tesla and a 4% jump in Nvidia, the Nasdaq rose 2.5% on Thursday, its fourth-sharpest rally of 2024. The biggest gain of the year for the tech-heavy index was a 3% increase on Feb. 22.

Lower interest rates tend to benefit tech stocks, because reduced borrowing costs and bond yields make risky bets more attractive. In addition to the central bank’s half-point reduction, the Federal Open Market Committee indicated through its “dot plot” the equivalent of 50 more basis points of cuts by the end of the year, eventually coming down by 2 percentage points beyond Wednesday’s move.

While the Nasdaq has been on a steady rise this year, powered by Nvidia and the enthusiasm around artificial intelligence, Thursday’s rally pushed the benchmark to its highest since mid-July. The Nasdaq peaked at 18,647.45 on July 10, and it’s now just 3.5% shy of that level, closing at 18,013.98.

Nvidia, whose processors are powering the generative AI boom and services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, gained 4% on Thursday to $117.87. The shares are up about 138% for the year after more than tripling in 2023, though they’re still 13% below their all-time high reached in June.

Nvidia counts on a relatively small group of customers — namely Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Oracle and OpenAI — for an outsized amount of revenue because those are the companies either developing large language models, hosting big AI workloads or doing both. Any sign of slackening demand creates concern around Nvidia’s stock.

But lower rates are seen as another potential boon.

Fellow chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom also rallied big on Thursday, gaining 5.7% and 3.9%, respectively. AMD is trying to challenge Nvidia in the AI market, but it’s far behind and has some skeptics on Wall Street. The stock is only up about 6% this year.

AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday that AI is a very long game, and we’re at the early stages.

“Let’s not be impatient. Tech trends are meant to play out over years, not over months,” Su said. “We’ve only been in this, let’s call it, ChatGPT world for maybe like 18 months. We’re all learning. It’s fun. We all use it.”

Su said AI is going to make its way into “all aspects of our lives,” including education and drug development.

“The beauty of all this is you need the computing, and that’s what we do,” Su said.

Tesla was the biggest gainer among tech’s megacap companies on Thursday, gaining 7.4%. The electric car maker has been a relative laggard for the year, down almost 2%, compared to the Nasdaq’s 20% gain. However, Tesla is up 72% from its low for the year in April.

Among the other top tech companies, Apple and Meta also closed with big gains, each rising almost 4%.

WATCH: Cramer’s interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

Elon Musk’s X faces steep daily fines in Brazil for allegedly evading a ban on the service there, according to a statement from the country’s supreme court on Thursday.

The fines, imposed by Brazil’s supreme court (Supremo Tribuno Federal or STF) amount to $5 million in Brazilian reals, about $920,000, a day. The court said it would continue to impose “joint liability” on Starlink, the satellite internet service owned and operated by SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace venture.

The suspension of X in Brazil was initially ordered by the country’s chief justice Alexandre de Moraes at the end of August, with orders upheld by a panel of justices in early September. The court found that under Musk, X had violated Brazilian law, which requires social media companies to employ a legal representative in the country and to remove hate speech and other content deemed harmful to democratic institutions. The court also found that X failed to suspend accounts allegedly engaged in doxxing federal officers.

X recently moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare, and appeared to be using dynamic internet protocol addresses that constantly change, enabling many users in Brazil to access the site. In a previous setup, the company had used static and specific IP addresses in Brazil, which were more easily blocked by internet service providers at the order of regulators.

Musk, who owns the company formerly known as Twitter, has been lashing out at de Moraes for months, and continued to do so after the order was issued. He’s characterized de Moraes as a villain, comparing him to Darth Vader and Harry Potter character Voldemort. He has also repeatedly called for de Moraes to be impeached.

Brazil previously withdrew money for fines it levied against X from the accounts of X and Starlink at financial institutions in the country. The new fines will begin as of Sept. 19, with the court calculating a total based on “the number of days of non-compliance” with its earlier orders to suspend X nationwide.

While Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, X has acquiesced to requests to remove profiles and posts in countries including India, Turkey and Hungary.

Musk and X may be in the process of complying with Brazil’s takedown orders as well. Correio Braziliense, a Brazilian publication, reported on Wednesday that X has started blocking accounts as per suspension orders issued by the country’s supreme court.

Among the apparently banned accounts were those of some internet influencers who are reportedly being investigated for spreading misinformation and promoting attacks against democratic institutions in Brazil. 

X said it wasn’t intending to restore access for Brazilian users.

“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team,” a company spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday. “To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”

Brazil’s national telecommunication agency, Anatel, has been ordered by de Moraes to prevent access to the platform by blocking Cloudflare, as well as Fastly and EdgeUno servers, and others that the court said had been “created to circumvent” a suspension of X in Brazil.

Cloudflare didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company is reportedly cooperating with authorities in Brazil.

Before the suspension, X had an estimated 22 million users in Brazil, according to Data Reportal.

WATCH: X is a financial ‘disaster’