Alakh Pandey grew up in Allahabad, now Prayagraj. His family lost their house and moved into a slum, and he began tutoring younger students from Class VIII to help pay the bills.
He studied mechanical engineering at HBTI Kanpur and left in his third year. His sister travelled to Kanpur to talk him out of quitting. In 2016 he started posting JEE physics videos with a marker, a whiteboard and a phone, and the channel reached 10,000 subscribers within a year.
The channel passed 2 million subscribers in 2019. In 2020 Physics Wallah became a company, and over 40,000 students joined the first live class on the app, which crashed. In June 2022 it raised $100 million and became a unicorn, and it opened its first offline centre in Kota.
In September 2024 it raised $210 million at a $2.8 billion valuation, led by Hornbill Capital. The IPO in November 2025 raised Rs 3,480 crore, and the company reported FY26 revenue of Rs 3,899.54 crore. A Netflix series, Hello Bachhon, premiered in March 2026.