Byju’s, an Indian edtech company, has gone from hero to zero in just two years. Following the pandemic tech boom, the online tutoring business — founded by Byju Raveendran — was India’s most valuable start-up in 2022, worth around $22bn. Its backers included BlackRock, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and even the World Bank’s investment arm. It sponsored the Fifa World Cup in Qatar and India’s illustrious cricket team. But last week, Raveendran said that the company was now in effect “worth zero”. What went wrong?
As interest rates rose following the pandemic, cheap money dried-up. That exposed cash burn at Byju’s, including on numerous marketing promotions. The value of the company plunged, and investors had to write off stakes worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Numerous legal battles — including a case brought by creditors in Delaware to locate almost half of a $1.2bn loan — have also highlighted governance problems.
Delayed account filings showed Byju’s losses almost doubled to nearly $1bn in the year to March 2022. Raveendran’s brother, a former sole director of Byju’s Alpha, which was created to receive loans, struggled to explain the whereabouts of part of the creditors’ loan. His “testimony lacks all credibility”, said a US bankruptcy judge at a hearing earlier this year. Separate findings have unearthed a money trail through various companies. The brothers deny allegations of wrongdoing.