The rise and collapse of Byju’s may sound like another story of a startup that failed. But it is the story of a particular moment in Indian capitalism when money was abundant and ambition was celebrated without restraint. And that was when growth itself became a moral virtue.
For years, Byju Raveendran embodied the mythology of aspirational India. He was the son of school teachers from Kerala who built a global education empire and became richer than old industrial families who had spent decades building factories and businesses. Investors saw him as a visionary. Parents trusted him with their children’s futures. Politicians and business leaders held him up as proof that India’s technology sector could produce world-beating companies.
Now the company lies in ruins. Thousands of employees have lost jobs. Investors are scattered across courtrooms in India, Singapore and the United States, fighting over loans, assets and missing money. The company once valued at $22 billion is bankrupt. And in the latest and perhaps most symbolic turn in the saga, a Singapore court has sentenced Raveendran to six months in jail for contempt after finding that he failed to comply with orders related to disclosure of assets. It is a staggering fall for a founder who, not very long ago, seemed to personify unstoppable success.
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The remarkable thing about Byju’s is that it did not begin as a cynical idea. There was something authentic at its core. That is partly why the collapse feels so dramatic. It was not built on nothing. It was built on talent, timing and eventually, excess.
The teacher who could fill stadiums
Long before he became one of India’s most recognisable entrepreneurs, Raveendran was known as a gifted teacher. He grew up in Azhikode in Kerala, raised by parents who taught in local schools. Friends have often described him as intensely competitive, unusually sharp with numbers and capable of solving aptitude problems in his head with startling speed.
He was working as an engineer with a shipping company when he began helping friends prepare for the CAT examination. Those sessions slowly turned into something larger. Word spread. Students came in bigger numbers. Auditoriums filled up. In an India obsessed with competitive exams and upward mobility, he developed an almost celebrity-like following.
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What made him stand out was not simply that he explained mathematics well. Plenty of teachers did that. He had the instincts of a performer. He turned problem-solving into spectacle. Students walked away feeling not merely coached but inspired. That emotional connection later became central to the Byju’s brand.
When smartphones and cheap internet transformed India in the early 2010s, the company was perfectly positioned to ride the wave. Byju’s learning app launched in 2015 and quickly became one of the country’s most recognisable educational products. Animated lessons, polished design and aspirational marketing helped it stand apart from traditional coaching centres that still relied on whiteboards and photocopied notes.
For a while, the excitement around the company was understandable. The product genuinely impressed many students and parents.
Covid turned Byju’s into a giant
Then came the pandemic. Schools shut overnight. Parents panicked. Children were stuck indoors staring at screens for months. Across the world, investors suddenly began treating online education not as a niche sector but as the future of learning itself. Few companies benefited more than Byju’s.
User numbers surged. Funding rounds became larger and more frequent. Global investors who barely understood the Indian education market rushed to participate. The company raised money at increasingly surreal valuations. At its peak, Byju’s was worth around $22 billion, making it India’s most valuable startup.
This was the phase when the company stopped behaving like a fast-growing business and started behaving like an empire in the making.
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Its logo appeared everywhere. Cricket sponsorships. The FIFA World Cup. Celebrity endorsements. Endless advertising campaigns. Acquisitions across continents. Byju’s bought Aakash Educational Services, WhiteHat Jr, Great Learning, Epic and Tynker in rapid succession. Every acquisition was framed as part of a grand plan to build a global education ecosystem for every age group and every market.
But hidden inside that breathtaking expansion was a dangerous assumption that pandemic behaviour would continue permanently. The world eventually reopened. Schools resumed. Students drifted back to classrooms. Parents became more selective about spending on online learning. The intensity of pandemic-era engagement faded much faster than Byju’s expected. The company had expanded for a future that never arrived.
The culture of endless growth
Byju’s was hardly alone in this. The startup world during those years had developed an almost religious faith in scale. Investors rewarded founders for growing quickly, not carefully. Losses were tolerated. Burn rates became badges of ambition. Profitability was treated as something old-fashioned companies worried about.
Inside that environment, restraint almost looked like weakness. Byju’s embraced the logic completely. Hire aggressively. Spend aggressively. Expand globally before competitors can react. Buy companies instead of building capabilities slowly. Raise larger rounds and keep moving faster. This strategy works only as long as fresh capital keeps arriving. The trouble begins when the mood changes.
By 2022, global interest rates had risen sharply. Technology valuations were collapsing around the world. Investors who once celebrated reckless expansion suddenly began asking about profitability and governance. Many startups struggled during this transition, but Byju’s was especially exposed because its costs had ballooned to extraordinary levels. The company had become too large, too fast.
The sales machine
As the pressure to maintain growth intensified, Byju’s developed a reputation that would eventually damage it deeply. Parents across India began complaining about aggressive sales tactics. Former employees spoke about impossible targets and relentless pressure to close deals. Families said they were persuaded into expensive subscription packages through emotional pitches about their children falling behind academically.
There were stories of middle-class parents being pushed toward loans and EMI structures they barely understood. Sales representatives allegedly used fear as a marketing tool, warning parents that children who failed to learn coding or advanced skills early would struggle in the future economy. Education businesses survive on trust. Once that trust weakened, the fallout spread quickly.
Many people who initially admired the company started viewing it differently. Byju’s no longer looked like a transformative educational platform. It began to resemble a giant sales organisation wrapped in the language of learning. That shift in perception was devastating because the company’s brand depended heavily on emotional credibility.
Cracks inside the company
At the same time, operational problems were becoming harder to hide. The acquisitions that once looked impressive were proving difficult to manage. Integrating very different businesses across countries and categories required far more discipline than the company seemed capable of sustaining. Costs kept rising. Internal complexity increased. Decision-making became slower and more chaotic.
Then came the governance concerns. Financial statements were delayed. Investors grew uneasy. Deloitte resigned as auditor. Board members stepped down. In corporate life, auditor resignations are among the loudest warning signs imaginable. They immediately trigger questions about financial controls, transparency and internal management. The aura around Byju’s began to crack. For years, investors had treated the company almost as a symbol of India’s startup future. Suddenly, the conversation changed. Questions that had once been dismissed as negativity started sounding urgent. How much money was the company actually making? How sustainable was the business model? Why were accounts delayed? Had growth masked deeper weaknesses all along?
The loan that became a trap
The single most consequential decision in the company’s decline was probably the $1.2 billion term loan it raised from foreign lenders. Debt changes the psychology of a business. Equity investors can tolerate losses if they believe future growth will compensate for present chaos. Lenders are different. They expect repayment schedules, compliance and financial discipline. As the crisis deepened, disputes over the loan exploded into litigation.
Lenders alleged that roughly $533 million had been transferred through a complicated network of entities and offshore structures. Court proceedings in the United States became increasingly hostile. Bankruptcy litigation followed. Investigations intensified. Asset tracing became central to the legal battle.
Raveendran has denied wrongdoing repeatedly. Even after the recent Singapore ruling, he insisted that the matter related to procedural issues surrounding disclosure and not to fraud or dishonesty. He also claimed that settlement discussions with lenders and stakeholders were close to completion.
But by then, the company’s credibility had already been shattered.
Every new lawsuit weakened confidence further. Employees left. Vendors demanded payments. Investors stopped believing management assurances. Customers became uncertain about the future. Businesses often collapse gradually before they collapse suddenly. Byju’s entered that spiral and could no longer escape it.
“The company is worth zero now”
One of the most revealing moments came when Raveendran himself acknowledged how far things had deteriorated. “The company is worth zero now,” he said during one phase of the crisis. There was something unusually stark about that statement. Startup founders are trained to project optimism even in disaster. Public confidence often depends on it. But the scale of destruction by that point had become impossible to disguise.
What made the collapse especially painful was that Byju’s had once appeared to solve a genuinely important Indian problem. Millions of families wanted access to better education. The country’s coaching culture was massive, fragmented and often poor in quality. Technology seemed capable of democratising learning at scale. For a while, Byju’s looked like the company that had figured it out. Then growth became an obsession in itself.
The role investors played
It is tempting to tell the story as a morality tale about one overambitious founder, but that would ignore the role global capital played in creating the conditions for excess. Investors pushed startups across the world toward hypergrowth during the pandemic years. Large valuations generated pressure for ever-larger expansion. Acquisitions were celebrated because they signalled dominance. Companies were encouraged to spend aggressively in pursuit of market leadership.
Byju’s was one of the clearest examples of what happened when that ecosystem lost touch with financial reality. The same investors who later criticised governance and discipline had once rewarded the company precisely for moving fast and spending heavily. During boom periods, scrutiny weakens because rising valuations create the illusion that everything is working. Byju’s benefited enormously from that atmosphere. Eventually, it became trapped inside it.
The symbolism of the Singapore ruling
The recent Singapore court order sentencing Raveendran to six months in jail for contempt may not be the end of the legal saga. Multiple proceedings are still underway across jurisdictions. Settlement discussions reportedly continue. Raveendran insists there has been no finding of fraud and says the matter has been portrayed unfairly.
Still, the ruling carries enormous symbolic weight. A founder who once represented the triumph of India’s startup revolution is now fighting disclosure battles in foreign courts over ownership structures and assets. The contrast is almost cinematic. The journey from packed CAT classrooms in Kerala to international insolvency litigation captures not only the story of one entrepreneur, but also the rise and excesses of India’s startup boom itself.
What remains after the collapse
The failure of Byju’s contains lessons that extend far beyond edtech.
The first is that valuation can create dangerous illusions. Investors may assign enormous paper worth to companies long before their businesses become stable or sustainable.
The second is that extraordinary conditions often distort judgement. Covid accelerated online education dramatically, but emergency behaviour rarely lasts forever.
Another lesson concerns governance. During boom years, financial controls and transparent accounting can appear secondary to growth. In reality, they become most important precisely when companies are scaling rapidly and handling enormous sums of money.
And perhaps the deepest lesson is about ambition itself. Byju’s was not destroyed because it lacked vision. It was destroyed because vision eventually outran discipline. In the end, the company did not collapse in one spectacular moment. It unravelled slowly, through accumulation: too much expansion, too much borrowing, too much confidence that growth would continue indefinitely. That confidence once made Byju’s look invincible. It also helped bring the company down.
