‘We were growing a little too soon, too fast’: Byju Raveendran admits to big missteps that brought BYJU'S down

Once hailed as the face of India’s edtech boom, Byju Raveendran , founder & CEO of BYJU’S, now finds himself battling to salvage the mission that made him a household name. From packed stadium classes to a multi-billion-dollar global empire, his journey mirrored the rise of India's startup ambitions — until it began to unravel.

In a candid conversation with ANI, this time Raveendran acknowledged that strategic missteps, hasty global expansion, and unexpected macroeconomic shocks contributed to BYJU’S unravelling over the past few years.

“I won't deny, so to when we tried expanding from India to the whole world, we made some business mistakes, maybe we could have taken it a little bit slowly, we (were) growing little too soon, too fast,” he said.

Raveendran traced the crisis to the company’s aggressive push into 21 countries during the pandemic-era boom from 2019 to 2021, fuelled by capital and investor pressure to grow. “Every investor — we have 160 world-class equity investors — the mandate was: grow, grow, change the way kids learned,” he said. “We were raising money for growth… [but] when the world changed — interest rates went up, the Russia-Ukraine war started — liquidity dried up, $700 million of signed, committed capital didn’t turn up,” Raveendran added.

The liquidity crunch hit BYJU’S hard, disrupting operations, halting acquisitions, and derailing its global ambitions.

“From (2022) onwards, it's almost now 3 years we have been struggling for liquidity, but I have no regrets in terms of putting all that money back because I was doing that to save the mission,” he said, emphasising that he and his family personally reinvested thousands of crores to sustain the company during the downturn.

“Next two years every month we started putting 100 crores 150 crores all of which is made from this mission (and) I was doing that to protect the mission,” he added.

BYJU’S is currently mired in a complex legal and financial crisis, centred around a $1.2 billion term loan and ongoing insolvency proceedings. The situation escalated after a default on a ₹158.9 crore sponsorship payment to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which triggered a corporate insolvency case in June last year. Although BYJU’S and BCCI have since reached a settlement, the matter has become further entangled after GLAS Trust, the term loan trustee, objected, claiming the funds used for the settlement were misallocated. The Bengaluru bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has now directed that the settlement be presented to BYJU’S Committee of Creditors (CoC), a move that could determine the company’s future.

Raveendran has alleged that the insolvency proceedings were influenced by “one or two aggressive hedge funds,” working through legal and administrative intermediaries to gain control of the company. “We missed these dirty games which literally one or two aggressive hedge funds who were able to manipulate an entire system using EY, using Khaitan, and this (resolution professional) RP…(they’re) just like a pawn in the game, so I was not expecting things like this can happen,” added Raveendran.

Responding to media portrayals of personal wealth, he pushed back, saying “I don’t even know the names of those 10 luxury cars they say we have. We stay in a rented mansion… I hate people who talk about all this.” Raveendran shared that the founders, including his brother and his wife, sold their final remaining assets in India, including their homes.

Despite the turmoil, Raveendran claimed the company’s core mission lives on, carried forward by unpaid but committed teachers and product developers. “They are building BYJU’S 3.0 in the background. I’m not in a position to disclose what it will be, but it will again be built on the same mission: to create a love for learning.”

The new version of BYJU’S, he said, will be designed for scale and impact, as it was in the early days when his classes grew from 35 friends to stadium-sized sessions by word of mouth. Currently, 60% of BYJU’S students are based in India, with the rest spread across the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and other regions — a base Raveendran hopes to re-engage through what he calls a “forced disruption” that could reset the edtech giant’s future.