BYJU'S

Timeline

1. 2011Byju Raveendran, Divya Gokulnath and a group of students set up Think and Learn in Bengaluru to sell video lessons.
2. 2012The company enters the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India and Fast 500 Asia Pacific rankings.
3. 2013Aarin Capital provides the first seed funding.
4. 2015BYJU'S The Learning App is launched in August for school students in India.
5. 2017Think and Learn buys TutorVista and Edurite from Pearson, its first acquisition.
6. 2017The company reports revenue of about 260 crore rupees for the year to March 2017.
7. 2018Revenue roughly doubles to about 520 crore rupees and BYJU'S becomes India's first education technology unicorn.
8. 2019Osmo, a maker of educational games for children aged three to eight, is acquired for about 120 million dollars.
9. 2019BYJU'S wins the rights to sponsor the Indian cricket team jersey until 2023.
10. 2020WhiteHat Jr is bought in a deal reported at about 300 million dollars.
11. 2020New investors arrive at a valuation of about 10.5 billion dollars, taking the company past the decacorn mark.
12. 2021Aakash Educational Services is acquired in a cash and stock deal estimated at about 950 million dollars.
13. 2021Epic, a United States reading platform for children, is bought in a 500 million dollar deal.
14. 2021Great Learning and Toppr are acquired, and coding platform Tynker is bought for about 200 million dollars.
15. 2021GeoGebra, the mathematics software used by teachers worldwide, is acquired in a deal reported at about 100 million dollars.
16. 2022The company raises 800 million dollars at a valuation of about 22 billion dollars, its peak.
17. 2022BYJU'S becomes an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
18. 2022Roughly 4,000 employees are laid off as the funding market tightens; the Ministry of Corporate Affairs questions the delay in filing accounts.
19. 2023Audited accounts for the year to March 2022 are filed after a delay of about 17 months.
20. 2024Overseas lenders begin bankruptcy proceedings and the American arm files for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware.
21. 2024The National Company Law Tribunal admits an insolvency petition from the BCCI over unpaid dues of about 158 crore rupees.
22. 2024Byju Raveendran says publicly that the company is worth zero.
23. 2025The company remains under insolvency proceedings and the Android app is delisted from the Google Play Store over unpaid cloud bills.
24. 2026Bids for the company's assets and a settlement over the Aakash Educational Services stake are reported during the year.

What it does

BYJU'S sold education as a subscription. Its main product was a learning app that carried recorded lessons for school students from classes four to twelve, built around short animated videos of twelve to twenty minutes, followed by practice questions and tests. The company charged for annual access after a short free trial, so revenue arrived upfront and the cost of serving a student arrived over the year.^[1][3]

Around that core, the group assembled a set of businesses that covered most of what an Indian student might buy: coaching for school examinations and for entrance tests such as the JEE, NEET and CAT, coding classes for children through WhiteHat Jr, and degree level courses through Great Learning. It also sold classroom teaching through a chain of tuition centres, a model it began building in 2021.^[1][6]

The company described itself as a global learning company and expanded into the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico. By 2023 it claimed more than 150 million registered students, a figure that was never independently audited and that was reported while the business was already shrinking.^[1]

It was, in short, a marketing company with an education product attached. Sales teams signed families on multi-year contracts with the help of consumer loans, and the app was the delivery mechanism for something closer to a purchase than a subscription. That structure is what made the growth fast and what made the collapse so complete.^[1][15]

History

The company began as a coaching experiment rather than a startup. Byju Raveendran had been teaching mathematics to students preparing for entrance examinations since 2006, first in Kerala and then in Bengaluru, and the first version of the business was classes recorded and sold on memory cards. Think and Learn Private Limited was incorporated in 2011 by Raveendran, his wife Divya Gokulnath and a group of his students, and it kept the classroom reputation as its main asset.^[1][2]

In August 2015 the firm launched BYJU'S The Learning App, which turned the classes into a product that could be sold anywhere with an internet connection. Growth was driven by advertising on television and at sporting events, and by a sales force that followed up on every download. By 2018 the app had about 15 million registered users, of whom roughly 900,000 had paid, and the company became India's first education technology unicorn in the same year.^[1][15]

The years 2019 to 2021 were spent buying scale. Think and Learn purchased Osmo, WhiteHat Jr, Aakash Educational Services, Epic, Great Learning, Toppr, Tynker, Gradeup and GeoGebra in a single burst, spending at least 2.8 billion dollars in total. Each acquisition was presented as a new age group or a new geography, and together they turned a school learning app into a group with products for children, teenagers, university students and working professionals.^{[1][4][6][7][8][9]}

The peak came in March 2022, when the company raised 800 million dollars at a valuation of about 22 billion dollars, with much of the round coming from its own founder alongside Sumeru Ventures, Vitruvian Partners and BlackRock. Within a year the market for loss making consumer internet companies had closed, the promised initial public offering had not happened, and the group was selling assets to service a 1.2 billion dollar term loan it had taken from overseas lenders.^[1]

What followed was a long unwinding: disputes with lenders over unpaid interest, an insolvency petition from the Board of Control for Cricket in India over sponsorship dues of about 158 crore rupees, an order admitting the company into insolvency in July 2024, a settlement that closed that order, and a Supreme Court judgment in October 2024 that restored the proceedings. The company that had been India's most valuable startup was by then a case number.^[1][15]

Between 2016 and 2020 the company looked like a genuine success story. It was the first Indian education company to win an investment from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, it was the subject of admiring case studies in business schools, and its founder was on the cover of magazines as an example of Indian soft power in technology. Rivals imitated the app format, and investors treated the sector as the next large consumer market after ecommerce.^[1][15][16]

The teaching reputation mattered in those years. Raveendran had built his name in coaching halls, and the earliest content was made with the small group of students who helped him record the first lessons, which is why the company credited them as part of the founding group. That origin was worth more than any marketing campaign, and the company used it in its own account of itself long after it had become a subscription sales business.^[1][2]

Founders and leadership

Byju Raveendran, born in 1980 in Azhikode in Kerala to two physics teachers, is the founder most associated with the company. He studied engineering, worked briefly in a shipping firm, and then taught mathematics to students preparing for entrance examinations, first as a tutor and then in large halls in Bengaluru. The teaching style, built on shortcuts and confidence, became the brand.^[1][2]

Divya Gokulnath, his wife, was one of his students and became a co-founder and director who handled content and people functions. Both were named in the American bankruptcy findings over the whereabouts of loan proceeds, and both remained the public face of the company as it went through insolvency.^[1]

The leadership layer below the founders changed constantly after 2022. Chief executives of acquired businesses left, including Karan Bajaj of WhiteHat Jr a year after that purchase, and the finance function became a source of dispute when accounts were filed late.^[10]

Ravi Raveendran, the founder's brother, was a director of Think and Learn, and Riju Ravindran was the director penalised in the United States bankruptcy court in 2024 for not disclosing the location of 533 million dollars of loan proceeds. The court found the two co-founders complicit in the transfers, a finding the company disputed.^[1]

The learning app

BYJU'S The Learning App was the product that made the company. It offered video lessons for classes four to twelve, mapped to Indian school syllabi, followed by practice questions and a dashboard for parents. Access was free for the first fifteen days and then sold as an annual subscription, and the company trained thousands of sales staff to call families who had downloaded it.^[1][16]

The teaching method relied on animated explanations of concepts rather than on a live teacher, which kept the marginal cost of a new student low and let the company promise a standard experience across the country. It also meant that the quality of the product could not be improved by the student or the parent, only by the company.^[1][16]

For exam preparation the group used BYJU'S Exam Prep, the renamed Gradeup platform, and classroom chains for medical and engineering entrance tests through Aakash. For young children it sold coding and activity classes through WhiteHat Jr, and for older learners it sold online degrees and professional certificates through Great Learning. The breadth was deliberate: the group wanted a product for every stage of education.^{[1][7][8][10]}

The company also owned GeoGebra, the free mathematics and geometry software used by teachers and students around the world, which gave it a foothold in schools it never properly monetised. In the last years of the group's life, the app was the part of the business still generating cash, which is why the lenders fought over it.^[1]

Acquisitions and expansion

The group's buying spree ran from 2017 to 2022 and was meant to turn a school test app into a company that covered every age. Each purchase came with its existing students, and each one had to be paid for from the same pool of investor money, which is the arithmetic that undid the company.^[1]

• TutorVista and Edurite, bought from Pearson in July 2017, brought online tutoring for Indian and overseas students.^[4]
• Osmo, bought in January 2019 for about 120 million dollars, made physical learning games for children aged three to eight.^[1]
• WhiteHat Jr, bought in July 2020 for about 300 million dollars, sold live coding classes to children and was later investigated by the advertising regulator over its claims.^[5][10]
• Aakash Educational Services, bought in April 2021 in a deal estimated at about 950 million dollars, was the largest classroom chain in medical entrance coaching.^[6]
• Epic, bought in July 2021 for 500 million dollars, was a United States reading platform with a library for school children.^[7]
• Great Learning and Toppr were bought in July 2021, one for professional education and the other for school exam preparation.^[1]
• Gradeup, bought in September 2021 and renamed BYJU'S Exam Prep, was a test preparation platform for government and competitive examinations.^[8]
• Tynker, bought in September 2021 for about 200 million dollars, taught coding to children in the United States.^[9]
• GeoGebra, bought in December 2021 in a deal reported at about 100 million dollars, was free mathematics software used in classrooms worldwide.^[1]

In total the company spent at least 2.8 billion dollars on a dozen acquisitions, most of it in 2021 at valuations set during the most optimistic months of the global tech market. When the funding stopped, the group was left with a set of businesses that had different cost structures, different products and no shared customer base.^[1]

Revenue and financials

Revenue grew quickly in the early years and then grew much more slowly than the spending. The company reported about 260 crore rupees of revenue in the year to March 2017 and about 520 crore rupees in the year to March 2018, a doubling that encouraged investors to value it in billions. Its plan for the year to March 2019 was to reach about 1,300 crore rupees of revenue.^[1][3]

The accounts for later years were filed late and restated, which is itself part of the story. Audited accounts for the year to March 2022 were filed about 17 months after the deadline, and the company explained the delay as the difficulty of consolidating the accounts of the businesses it had bought. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs asked for an explanation and Deloitte, the auditor, resigned soon after.^[1]

The accounts for the year to March 2022 showed losses running into thousands of crores of rupees on revenue well under 10,000 crore rupees, a gap that one year of subscriptions could never close. The group had also changed how it recognised streaming revenue, moving from booking a multi-year contract upfront to spreading it across the period of use, which cut the revenue it could report in any one year.^[1]

By 2023 the company was raising money at a fraction of its peak value, selling assets to repay a 1.2 billion dollar term loan, and telling employees it would reach profitability by growing the existing business. In October 2024 the founder said publicly that the company was worth zero, and Forbes put his own net worth at zero for that year, down from about 2.1 billion dollars.^[1][15]

Shareholding and ownership

Think and Learn was privately held, so ownership was a matter of funding rounds rather than of stock exchange disclosure. Investors included Sequoia Capital India, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Tencent, Sofina, Lightspeed Venture Partners, the Qatar Investment Authority, Verlinvest, IFC, Naspers Ventures, CPPIB and General Atlantic, followed later by Bond Capital, BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, B Capital, Baron Funds, Silver Lake, Prosus, and Sumeru Ventures.^[1]

Byju Raveendran and Divya Gokulnath held the founder stake, financed in part by personal borrowing, and the founder was the largest single investor in the March 2022 round. That stake was diluted heavily during the crisis: by 2024 the lenders and the courts, not the founders, controlled what happened to the company's assets, and a group of overseas lenders discussed converting debt into equity in the parent.^[1]

The company was never listed. Its shares could not be sold, which meant that the fall in valuation was recorded in the accounts of investors and in reports, not in a market price. The one asset with a public price was the 1.2 billion dollar term loan the parent had taken, which traded at a deep discount as the default deepened.^[1]

Employees and offices

At its peak the group employed more than fifty thousand people across teaching, content production, sales, technology and support, with the largest concentration in Bengaluru. Hiring ran ahead of revenue by design, on the argument that the sales force was the growth engine.^[1]

The cuts began in 2021 and never stopped. About 4,000 people were laid off in 2022 as the company tried to reach profitability, and reports through the year said more than five thousand had been let go, mainly from sales and marketing. Around 500 more left in 2024.^[1]

The layoffs were reported together with complaints about how they were carried out: unpaid notice periods, sudden calls, and severance that employees said did not match what was promised. The company described the exits as performance related and part of a plan to reach profitability.^[1]

The main offices were in Bengaluru, with operations in Mumbai, Delhi and other Indian cities, and offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore. The American arm, Byju's Alpha, was the borrower on the term loan and became the centre of the bankruptcy cases.^[1]

Lenders and the insolvency case

The end of the company was a debt story before it was an education story. In 2021 an American subsidiary borrowed 1.2 billion dollars from overseas lenders, and after interest payments were missed in 2022 a group of creditors, including Redwood Capital, began to act. The dispute moved to courts in the United States and to Indian tribunals.^[1]

In February 2024 the American arm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware. By then a United States bankruptcy court had penalised the company's director Riju Ravindran for refusing to disclose the location of 533 million dollars of loan proceeds, and had said that the two co-founders were complicit in the transfers. A judge later ordered a daily penalty of 10,000 dollars until the money was traced.^[1]

In India, the Board of Control for Cricket in India filed an insolvency petition over unpaid jersey sponsorship dues of about 158 crore rupees. The National Company Law Tribunal admitted the petition in July 2024 and appointed an insolvency resolution professional to run the company's day to day affairs. The company settled with the cricket board and the appellate tribunal closed the case, before the Supreme Court set that order aside in October 2024 on a challenge by the American creditor Glas Trust and restored the proceedings.^[1][15]

The company has remained under insolvency proceedings since then. Its Android app was delisted from the Google Play Store in May 2025 over unpaid cloud and hosting bills, and through 2025 and 2026 the case has continued with bids for the company's assets and a settlement over the Aakash Educational Services stake among the matters before the tribunal.^[1]

The cricket team and advertising

Advertising was the company's second biggest cost after people, and cricket was where most of it went. In September 2020 BYJU'S replaced Oppo as the title sponsor of the Indian national cricket team, and in July 2019 it had won the rights to the team jersey until 2023. The board's dues on that contract were about 158 crore rupees, and it was the cricket board rather than an investor that eventually pushed the company into insolvency.^[1][13]

The brand also bought its way into world sport. In November 2020 it became title sponsor of the Indian Super League club Kerala Blasters, and in March 2022 it was named an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, one of the few Indian consumer brands to appear at that level of the tournament.^[1][13]

Television advertising in India during the years of the Indian Premier League and the cricket World Cup was expensive and effective, and the company bought it in volume. The campaigns promised that a child who used the app would learn better, with testimonials from students and parents, and they worked: downloads rose sharply after each tournament. What the advertising could not do was keep paying families signed up for the second and third years.^[1][15]

The same instinct ran through the acquisitions. The company bought brands with recognition, such as Aakash and Toppr, rather than building recognition, and it spent on sponsorship at the moment when its own accounts were not being filed. Advertising spend at that level is a fixed commitment, and the group made those commitments against revenue it expected to earn later.^[1][16]

Education for All and social programmes

Alongside the paid product the company ran an outreach programme called Education for All, launched in September 2020, with the stated aim of reaching five million children from low income families by 2025. Under it, BYJU'S Give collected old smartphones and tablets, had them refurbished, loaded them with lessons and passed them to children who had no device at home.^[1][12]

The programme was announced during the pandemic, when schools were closed and the gap between children with a device and children without one became the most visible problem in Indian education. The company presented it as a way of using its content library for children who would never be able to buy a subscription.^[12]

It also worked as a brand exercise, and after 2022 the programme was reported less often as the company cut costs. The company's charitable arm and the foundation associated with the founders had limited resources compared with the size of the business, and no independent assessment of how many children the programme actually reached was published.^[1]

The Aakash stake and what comes next

Aakash Educational Services was the biggest and most complicated asset the group owned. Bought in 2021 in a deal estimated at about 950 million dollars, largely in stock, it was also the business with the oldest brand, hundreds of classrooms and a set of founders who stayed on. When the parent's valuation fell, the value of the stock paid for Aakash fell with it, and a rights issue followed.^[1][6]

By 2024 Aakash was functioning independently with the parent's holding reduced, and the dispute over who owned what went to the National Company Law Tribunal in Bengaluru. The settlement reported in 2026 left the parent with a minority stake, understood to be about a third, and resolved the claim against the rights issue. For the creditors of Think and Learn, that stake was one of the few assets with a real business behind it.^[1][6]

The other pieces were sold, shut or absorbed. The American business went through Chapter 11 proceedings, the coding subsidiary had already lost its founder, and the overseas expansion planned for 2021 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico never became a material part of the business. The learning app itself, with its subscriber base, was what bidders looked at.^[1]

What the insolvency case will settle is not whether the product was good but how the money is divided. Creditors include the term loan lenders, small vendors and former employees, and the process has already been through the tribunal, the appellate tribunal and the Supreme Court. Indian insolvency cases of this size have historically taken years rather than months.^[1][15]

Regulation and investigations

Three arms of the Indian state looked at the company while it was still operating. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs wrote to it in August 2022 asking why audited accounts for the year to March 2021 had not been filed, which the company attributed to the work of consolidating its acquisitions. In April 2023 the Enforcement Directorate searched company offices under the Foreign Exchange Management Act and said it had seized documents.^[1]

The consumer protection side moved at the same time. On 24 June 2022 the Department of Consumer Affairs raised concerns about aggressive selling and misleading marketing by education technology companies in a meeting of the India EdTech Consortium, and asked the company to work with the advertising regulator on the complaints against it. The company said it would come back with an action plan.^[1][11]

The regulator that acted most concretely was the Advertising Standards Council of India, which asked WhiteHat Jr to withdraw five television advertisements. The Council also pushed the wider sector toward a code of conduct which several companies, including BYJU'S, signed through the industry body IAMAI in January 2022.^[1][11]

There is a pattern here that the company's defenders do not address. A business that sells to parents on the strength of advertising claims is regulated in exactly the area where the complaints were made, and every one of those complaints was raised publicly before the company stopped paying its bills.^[1]

Competition

BYJU'S competed with a small group of well funded Indian education technology companies and with the offline coaching industry it tried to buy. Unacademy, Vedantu, upGrad and Physics Wallah were in the same market, and all four were cheaper to run because they had not bought a dozen companies at the top of the market.^[1][11]

The offline competition was the tougher one. Aakash, Allen Career Institute and the local coaching centres of Kota and Hyderabad had reputations built over decades, and the parents who bought those courses were the same parents BYJU'S was calling. The company's answer was to buy Aakash, which gave it the brand but also the highest cost base in the group.^[1]

In the global market it competed with established names in children's education and with free content on YouTube, which set the price expectation for video lessons at zero. A company that charged several thousand rupees a year for recorded video was always vulnerable to a free alternative.^[1]

Controversies and criticism

The criticism of BYJU'S fell into four groups: how it sold, what it promised, how it counted and how it treated the people it hired. Each was reported while the company was growing, not only after it failed.^[1]

• Sales practices. Former sales staff said the company pushed expensive multi-year courses on families who could not afford them, and that courses were financed with loans arranged by partner lenders. The subscription continued even when a family was unhappy, and the company collected the full fee upfront.^[1]
• Misleading advertising. The Advertising Standards Council of India asked WhiteHat Jr to pull five television advertisements over claims about a fictional child named Wolf Gupta who was said to have received large job offers. The regulator found the claims misleading.^[1]
• Litigation against a critic. The company filed a 20 crore rupee defamation suit in 2020 against Pradeep Poonia, a software engineer who criticised its teaching and hiring, and later withdrew it.^[1]
• A data leak. Personal information of more than 200,000 users was exposed at one point, and the company was also criticised over the security of student data.^[1]
• Accounting and audits. The change in revenue recognition, the resignation of Deloitte after the accounts were restated, and the 17-month delay in filing are all recorded in the company's own filings.^[1]
• Treatment of employees. Repeated layoffs, unpaid dues reported by former staff and the departure of senior leaders of acquired businesses were reported through 2022 and 2023.^[1][10]

The company replied to the criticism in the same way each time: that it was a large employer with a product that worked, that the complaints came from a small number of people, and that its practices were legal. In 2022 it joined other education companies in the India EdTech Consortium set up by the industry body IAMAI with a code of conduct, days after the Department of Consumer Affairs raised concerns about aggressive selling in the sector.^[1][11]

Reading the numbers

The clearest number in the story is the gap between what the company raised and what it earned. It collected about 785 million dollars of equity by 2019 and more than 5 billion dollars in total, spent at least 2.8 billion dollars on acquisitions, and never reported a year of profit. A valuation of 22 billion dollars in March 2022 was a price agreed by investors, not a measure of the business.^[1]

The second number is the debt. A 1.2 billion dollar loan taken in 2021 was, on any honest reading, larger than the free cash flow the group could generate, and it converted a funding problem into a legal one. Insolvency in India was triggered not by the investors who stopped funding but by the cricket board that was not paid.^[1][15]

The third number is what remained. The learning app kept some millions of paying students, the Aakash stake went through a settlement, and the brand still had recognition, which is why there were bidders for the assets in 2026. In Indian startup history BYJU'S is the case that is cited whenever an investor wants to explain why growth at any cost was a bad trade.^[1]

It is worth separating the two failures. One was a capital allocation failure: the company bought a dozen businesses at the top of the market, at prices set by a valuation that later fell by more than ninety per cent, and financed the purchases with borrowed money. The other was an operating failure: a business that sold annual subscriptions to families through a large sales force never earned enough from those subscriptions to cover the cost of signing them.^[1][15]

The comparison most often drawn in India is with the information technology companies of the 1990s, which grew from services that customers paid for in cash. The edtech companies of the 2020s grew from investor money spent on acquiring students, and BYJU'S was the largest example. Its collapse ended the funding market for Indian consumer education, and the companies that survived are the ones that charged less and spent less.^[1][11]

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