Startup Deep Dive : BYJU’S — how India’s 2 billion edtech giant was marked down to zero

In October 2022, BYJU’S was worth $22 billion, India’s most valuable startup, built on the promise that a phone screen could replace the tuition teacher. By June 2024, one of the investors who helped get it there, Prosus, had marked its entire stake in the same company down to zero.

Nothing in between was quiet. An auditor walked out mid-mandate. Three board members resigned within days of each other. A $1.2 billion loan turned into a courtroom war spanning Delaware and Bengaluru. And the company that once taught 150 million registered students, by its own count, is today being run through an insolvency process, with its founder fighting creditors, regulators and a Singapore contempt order all at once. This is the story of how that happened, with the numbers on both sides of the fall.

Quick facts

What they do

BYJU’S sells structured exam preparation to Indian school students and their parents, delivered two ways: a subscription app with recorded video lectures, animations and practice tests for kindergarten through class 12 and for entrance exams such as JEE, NEET and UPSC; and, since its 2021 acquisition of Aakash Educational Services, physical classroom coaching through Aakash centres and Byju’s Tuition Centres, which run classroom programmes in around 240 locations, as reported by Business Standard in May 2024. The customer is rarely the student alone. It is a parent household paying an annual or multi-year fee, often on a loan arranged at the point of sale, for a promise of higher marks in a system where marks decide college seats and careers.

The origin

Byju Raveendran did not start as a technology founder. He began by coaching friends preparing for the Common Admission Test after a stint as an engineer, and his classes scaled by word of mouth into stadium-sized sessions attended by thousands of students at a time, according to accounts of his career carried by Rest of World and other outlets tracking his biography. Think and Learn Private Limited was incorporated in 2011 to formalise that coaching business. The insight that later became the company was simple: if one teacher could hold a stadium, video could hold the whole country. In August 2015 that idea became the BYJU’S app, combining recorded lectures with animation and games; it drew about 2 million downloads within three months of launch. Within a year, the app had converted roughly 300,000 of those downloads into paying subscribers, an early proof that Indian parents would pay for a screen-based substitute for tuition.

The struggle years

BYJU’S is usually told as an unbroken rise until 2023, but the record shows earlier, real distress inside its expansion strategy. Between 2019 and 2021, the company went on an acquisition run it could not organically finance: WhiteHat Jr, a coding-for-kids platform, for a reported $300 million in August 2020; Aakash Educational Services, a decades-old test-prep coaching chain, in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $950 million in April 2021; and Great Learning, an online higher-education platform, for about $600 million in July 2021. Reporting on the spree put BYJU’S acquisition spend at roughly $2.2 billion in 2021 alone. To fund it, the company raised a $1.2 billion Term Loan B in November 2021 from a syndicate of roughly 37 international lenders, pledging its US subsidiary Byju’s Alpha as collateral. WhiteHat Jr itself became a source of reputational damage rather than growth: the Advertising Standards Council of India found its ads, including one featuring a fictional prize student called “Wolf Gupta” who supposedly won a multi-crore job offer, misleading, and ordered them withdrawn. None of this showed up in a public profit-and-loss statement for a long time, because BYJU’S simply stopped filing its numbers on schedule, the first hairline crack in what would become a structural failure of governance.

The turning point

The single event that broke the growth story into a before and after was the company’s audited FY22 result, finally disclosed in September 2023, some eighteen months late: a consolidated loss of ₹8,245 crore against operating revenue of ₹5,014 crore for the year ended March 2022. A company had raised money at a $22 billion valuation as recently as October 2022 while quietly sitting on a loss nearly double its revenue for the year immediately before that round. The gap between the story investors had been sold and the number finally filed is the turning point of this deep dive: everything that follows, the auditor’s exit, the board resignations, the loan default fight and the insolvency case, traces back to that mismatch becoming public.

The money behind it

Across more than two decades of institutional fundraising, trackers differ on the precise total BYJU’S raised, from about $4.6 billion according to Tracxn to about $5.8 billion by other aggregations, but there is no dispute about the roster: Prosus (as Naspers Ventures, investing from 2018), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Sequoia Capital (later Peak XV Partners), General Atlantic, Tiger Global, BlackRock, Silver Lake and Qatar Investment Authority all put money in, most recently at the $22 billion valuation reached in October 2022 when QIA joined a $250 million round. Each backer changed something concrete. Tiger Global’s 2019 round pushed BYJU’S past $8 billion and into India’s most-valuable-startup conversation for the first time. QIA’s participation in 2022 was read by the market as validation that sovereign capital still trusted the numbers, right before those numbers were shown to be overdue and, eventually, damaging. The unwind was just as concrete: BlackRock cut its implied valuation of BYJU’S by 95%, to about $1 billion, in a filing reported in January 2024; Prosus wrote its 9.6% stake down from $493 million to zero in its FY24 annual report published in June 2024, describing an internal rate of return of minus 100% on money it had put in since 2019. A $200 million rights issue in early 2024, meant to keep the lights on, priced the company at roughly $220 million to $225 million, a valuation cut of about 99% from the 2022 peak, and was contested in court by four of the very investors, Prosus, General Atlantic, Sofina and Peak XV, who had backed the earlier rounds.

How it makes money

The model is a prepaid, high-ticket subscription sold like a consumer good rather than software. A family pays a large upfront or financed fee, commonly running into tens of thousands of rupees over one to three years, for app access, live classes or coaching-centre seats; BYJU’S has not published a standard per-student fee or take rate, so no verified figure can be given here. Costs sit heavily in sales, marketing and personnel: a large in-house and franchise sales force paid on conversions, content production, and, after 2021, the fixed costs of running acquired businesses such as Aakash’s coaching centres and WhiteHat Jr’s teaching staff. The part outsiders got wrong for years was reading subscription revenue booked over multi-year contracts, and gross billings from loan-financed sales, as if they were cash profit; the FY22 accounts, once filed, showed the opposite, a business spending far more to acquire and service each customer than it collected from them in the same year. Margin, where it exists at all in the group today, sits in Aakash’s coaching-centre model, which runs on fixed classroom capacity and a defined annual fee rather than the open-ended discounting that characterised BYJU’S own direct-sales app business.

The numbers

Only one full year of BYJU’S own audited consolidated financials has been made public in recent years, a consequence of the delayed and repeatedly restated filings that cost it its original auditor. FY23 figures cited below come from information the company shared with investors and media, not from a filed audit, and are marked accordingly.

The Aakash line is worth reading carefully: its core coaching business was roughly flat, revenue moved from ₹2,399 crore in FY23 to ₹2,438 crore in FY24, and it swung from a small profit of ₹153 crore to a small loss of ₹61 crore on operations, but exceptional items tied to its parent’s troubles pushed its reported FY24 loss to ₹2,443 crore, a reminder that BYJU’S problems now show up in the accounts of businesses it once acquired to grow.

Where the money comes from

BYJU’S built its scale on India’s K-12 and competitive-exam market, and geography inside India, not international revenue, is where its volume sits: the app’s install base and BYJU’S Tuition Centres are concentrated in Indian cities where board-exam and entrance-exam coaching is already a mass consumer habit. The surprise, once the numbers became visible, was how much of the group’s actual coaching revenue now runs through Aakash rather than the original app-and-video product BYJU’S was known for. Aakash alone reported ₹2,438 crore of revenue in FY24, a meaningful share of whatever the wider group was earning, from a brick-and-mortar coaching format BYJU’S did not invent but bought in 2021. The company that marketed itself as replacing the tuition class ended up depending on one of the country’s oldest tuition-class brands to keep showing top-line numbers at all.

The risks

Three risks are documented, not speculative. First, the $1.2 billion Term Loan B dispute: the Delaware Court of Chancery found BYJU’S in default, and the Delaware Supreme Court upheld that finding in a ruling reported in September 2024, with lenders separately alleging that $533 million of loan proceeds could not be accounted for; this dispute sits underneath the wider insolvency case. Second, active insolvency proceedings before India’s National Company Law Tribunal: admitted in July 2024 over an unpaid ₹158.90 crore sponsorship due to the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the case has since been through the NCLAT and the Supreme Court multiple times, most recently with the Supreme Court declining in November 2025 to let the case be withdrawn without creditor-committee approval, and a resolution-plan deadline pushed out to June 2026 with no plan approved as of that date. Third, founder and personal-conduct risk: a Singapore court sentenced Byju Raveendran to six months in jail for contempt in May 2026, over his failure to comply with asset-disclosure orders dating back to April 2024, while a separate US default judgment of over $1 billion against him for alleged fund diversion from Byju’s Alpha was later reversed for fresh submissions, with a damages phase set for January 2026. Each of these is a live legal process, not a closed chapter.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson is not “edtech failed” or “growth is bad.” It is that a subscription business funded by aggressive, loan-linked, high-pressure sales can show growth and cash collection long before it shows the accounting loss those sales are generating, and that gap can run for years if nobody outside the company forces a timely audit. BYJU’S did not collapse because parents stopped valuing exam coaching; Aakash’s steady, unglamorous coaching-centre revenue proves that demand held up. It collapsed because a $22 billion valuation was built and defended for two years without the audited numbers to support it, and the day those numbers surfaced, every other relationship in the business, with its auditor, its board, its lenders and its regulators, unravelled in sequence.

Frequently asked questions

Was BYJU’S ever India’s most valuable startup?

Yes. It reached a $22 billion valuation in October 2022 when Qatar Investment Authority joined a $250 million round at that price, matching a March 2022 round at the same figure, as reported by TechCrunch and Business Standard at the time.

What is BYJU’S latest audited revenue and loss?

Its most recent audited consolidated numbers are for FY22, the year ended March 2022: revenue of ₹5,014 crore ($522 million) and a loss of ₹8,245 crore, filed in September 2023 after an eighteen-month delay. No later year has been publicly confirmed as audited at the group level as of this writing.

Why did Deloitte resign as BYJU’S auditor?

Deloitte resigned in June 2023, citing the company’s failure to provide its FY22 financial statements for audit well past the statutory deadline, a delay that also preceded the resignation of three board members representing Peak XV Partners, Prosus and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that same month.

Is BYJU’S still valued at $22 billion?

No. BlackRock marked its holding to imply a valuation of about $1 billion in January 2024, Prosus wrote its stake to zero in June 2024, and a 2024 rights issue priced the company at roughly $220 million to $225 million, a decline of about 99% from the 2022 peak.

Is BYJU’S bankrupt?

Its parent, Think & Learn Private Limited, has been under insolvency proceedings before the National Company Law Tribunal since July 2024. As of June 2026, the resolution process remained ongoing with no creditor-approved plan finalised and litigation continuing in Indian and US courts.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch, “Indian edtech giant Byju’s raises $250 million in fresh funding,” October 2022
• Business Standard, “Byju’s raises $250 mn from existing investors, valuation remains at $22 bn,” October 2022
• CNBC, “India’s Byju’s lost more than $20 billion in valuation — what went wrong with the startup darling?,” March 2024
• Bloomberg, “Deloitte Quits as Byju’s Auditor Piling Pressure on Tech Startup,” June 2023
• Business Standard, “Edtech giant Byju’s trouble deepen: Deloitte resigns as statutory auditors,” June 2023
• TechCrunch, “Prosus and Sequoia confirm execs’ resignation from Byju’s board,” June 2023
• BusinessToday, “More trouble for Byju’s as Peak XV Partners, Prosus confirm representatives resign from board,” June 2023
• Business Standard, “Edtech firm Byju’s to lay off 4,000 employees in a restructuring exercise,” September 2023
• TechCrunch, “BlackRock cuts Byju’s valuation by 95% to $1 billion,” January 2024
• TechCrunch, “Byju’s says $200 million rights issue that cuts valuation by 99% fully subscribed,” February 2024
• WION, “Byju’s valuation falls 99 pc in $200m rights issue: Report,” February 2024
• Business Today, “For Prosus, Byju’s is worth zero, firm cites decline in value for investors for mark down,” June 2024
• YourStory, “Prosus writes off its investment in Byju’s; recognises $493 million loss,” June 2024
• Inc42, “Exclusive: BYJU’S FY23 Revenue Touches INR 6,500 Cr,” 2024
• Entrackr, “Byju’s-linked exceptional costs drag Aakash into Rs 2,443 Cr loss in FY24,” 2024
• BusinessToday, “Setback for Byju’s: Delaware Supreme Court upholds ruling that found Byju’s in default on $1.2 bn Term Loan B,” September 2024
• TechCrunch, “Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, faces insolvency proceedings,” July 2024
• Bar and Bench, “Supreme Court dismisses plea against BCCI–Byju’s insolvency withdrawal,” November 2025
• Business Standard, “Supreme Court turns down Byju’s plea to halt insolvency proceedings,” November 2025
• BusinessToday, “Can Byju Raveendran still shape Byju’s insolvency outcome?,” June 2026
• Business Standard, “NCLT pauses Byju’s insolvency bidding till Aug 31, giving founders relief,” July 2026
• Business Standard, “Byju’s founder says Delaware court amends judgment, sets damages phase for Jan 2026,” December 2025
• Bloomberg, “Startup Founder Byju Raveendran Sentenced to Six Months for Contempt of Court,” May 2026
• BusinessToday, “Byju’s founder Raveendran sentenced to 6 months in Singapore jail for contempt over asset order violations,” May 2026
• TechCrunch, “India’s Byju’s acquires WhiteHat Jr for $300 million,” August 2020
• Quartz, “How India’s Byju’s acquired its way to the top of the global ed-tech game,” 2021
• Business Standard, “Edtech company Byju’s starts new batches in 240 centres across India,” May 2024
• Business Insider India, “ASCI asks BYJU’S White Hat Jr to withdraw its social ads for making misleading claims,” 2020
• Rest of World, “Who is Byju Raveendran, founder of Indian edtech app Byju’s?,” 2025

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.