He Was India’s First EdTech Billionaire. Then Everything Collapsed at Once.

There are business stories about underdogs who rise. And then there are business stories about giants who believed they were invincible — right until the moment they weren’t. The story of Byju’s is the second kind. It is one of the most instructive business cautionary tales of the 21st century, and it is still unfolding.

Byju Raveendran was not born into wealth or connections. He grew up in Azhikode, a small coastal town in Kerala, in a family of teachers. He loved cricket. He loved mathematics. He had an unusual gift: he could explain complex concepts in ways that made people feel genuinely excited to understand them. He started tutoring friends informally. Word spread. He began conducting lectures in large halls. By 2010, he was teaching in stadiums to audiences of 20,000 students at a time.

From stadiums of eager students to a cautionary tale of unchecked growth.

In 2011, he co-founded Byju’s — an educational technology company that would put his teaching methodology inside a smartphone app. The timing was extraordinary: India’s smartphone penetration was about to explode, and the country’s 250 million school-aged children represented one of the largest untapped education markets on earth. By 2019, Byju’s had 35 million registered students. By 2020, COVID-19 had locked every school in India, and Byju’s subscriber numbers went vertical. The company raised billions from investors including Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In 2022, Byju Raveendran stood at the summit of Indian startup history — the founder of a company valued at $22 billion, the highest valuation ever assigned to an Indian startup.

And then everything broke at once.

A $22 billion valuation evaporating almost overnight.

The auditors resigned. Byju’s had failed to file its financial results for fiscal year 2022, citing the complexity of its rapid acquisitions — it had bought more than a dozen companies including Aakash Educational Services and Great Learning in a short period. When the results finally emerged, they revealed losses far larger than investors had understood. Allegations of aggressive, predatory sales practices — parents being pressured to take high-interest loans to buy Byju’s subscriptions for children as young as five — generated nationwide media coverage and regulatory scrutiny.

“The pressure to grow at all costs created a culture where the product became secondary to the sales numbers.”
— Former Byju’s senior employee, speaking anonymously

Investors filed suits. Board members resigned. The company defaulted on a $1.2 billion loan. Lenders attempted to seize assets. Staff went unpaid for months across multiple countries. The National Company Law Tribunal initiated insolvency proceedings. The $22 billion valuation — which had made Byju Raveendran one of the wealthiest men in India — became essentially theoretical as the company’s operational reality diverged catastrophically from its financing projections.

The lessons from Byju’s fall are multiple and severe. A genuinely great product — the teaching methodology was legitimately innovative — can be destroyed by growth-at-all-costs culture, governance failures, and the dangerous moment when a founder begins to believe that valuation equals reality. The students who genuinely benefited from Byju’s platform did not cause this collapse. The financial architecture and corporate governance did.

India’s market has produced some of the most dramatic business stories on Earth.

Byju’s is a story that Indian startup founders and investors will be studying for decades. Not because it ended badly — but because it went so high, so fast, that its fall illuminated every structural weakness that rapid, unmanaged growth can create.