In July 2021, BYJU’S paid $600 million for Great Learning, an upskilling company that had never taken a large venture round and was, by its own founders’ account, deliberately sold for $100 million less than it could have fetched. Four years later, BYJU’S itself was in insolvency proceedings, and the same founder who signed that sale bought the India business back for roughly $10 million — about 1.7% of the original price.
What happened in between is not a straightforward edtech-boom-and-bust story. Great Learning kept most of its team, turned its India entity from a loss of hundreds of crores into a profitable, US-heavy global business, and did it while the company that owned it was collapsing under debt it had nothing to do with. This piece traces the founding insight, the funding shape, the numbers on both sides of the BYJU’S years, and where the business actually sits today.
Quick facts
| Company | Great Learning (Great Learning Education Services Pvt Ltd, India; Great Learning Education Pte Ltd, Singapore) |
| Founded | 2013, Bengaluru |
| Founder(s) | Mohan Lakhamraju, Hari Krishnan Nair; Arjun Nair joined as third co-founder in 2016 |
| Businesses | Certificate, PG diploma and online degree programmes in data science, AI, cloud and cybersecurity; corporate upskilling via Great Learning for Business; a lower-cost AI-guided tier called Glaide |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹1,039 crore (~$108 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), FY25, consolidated group, as per Entrackr |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Operating profit ₹40.23 crore, FY25 (consolidated); net profit ₹13 crore (~$1.5 million), FY24 (consolidated), as reported |
| Listed | Private. Company-stated: no IPO or capital raise planned as of early 2025 |
| Market value / last valuation | $600 million (BYJU’S acquisition, July 2021); India entity bought back for about $10 million (December 2025); Singapore entity under receiver-led sale sought at $150–200 million (as of December 2025) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Mohan Lakhamraju, Founder-CEO, regained full control of the India entity in December 2025; the Singapore entity remains under receiver Kroll Pte Ltd, appointed by BYJU’S lenders in October 2023 |
What Great Learning actually sells
Great Learning sells professional upskilling to working adults, not degrees to school leavers. Its catalogue runs from postgraduate programmes and online degrees built with university partners — IIT Bombay, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Arizona and Deakin among them — down to short, AI-guided courses launched under a newer brand, Glaide, priced from about ₹1,500. Premium diploma and degree programmes sit at ₹2 lakh and above. Alongside individual learners, a business unit called Great Learning for Business sells the same content and delivery model to companies as corporate training. The company says it has reached more than 12 million learners on its premium programmes and, across all offerings, learners from more than 170 countries, spanning India, the US, the UK and the UAE.
The origin: a data-science bet from inside a business school
Mohan Lakhamraju’s path to Great Learning ran through Silicon Valley, not Indian ed-tech. He studied computer science at IIT Bombay, did a master’s at UC Berkeley, took an MBA at Stanford, co-founded a software company called Stratify that was later acquired by HP, and then spent time on the investing side — first at venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, then as managing director for Tiger Global’s India business. That is an unusual runway for an edtech founder: someone who had sat on both the operating and capital-allocation sides of technology businesses before deciding what to build next.
The insight, in 2013, was narrow and specific rather than a bet on online education in general. Through his role chairing the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai, Lakhamraju had a front-row view of India’s white-collar workforce and its widening gap in data science, analytics and machine-learning skills — a gap that generalist course platforms of the era were not built to close. He built Great Learning with Hari Krishnan Nair, whom he had met through Great Lakes, to deliver outcome-linked, blended learning in exactly that space; Arjun Nair joined as the third co-founder in 2016 as the company expanded beyond analytics into cybersecurity, software development and business programmes. Unlike most Indian startups of its cohort, Great Learning grew bootstrapped, funded by the founders and the business itself rather than a sequence of venture rounds — a choice that shaped everything about how the 2021 sale to BYJU’S was negotiated.
The struggle years: losses, then the wrong kind of leverage
The hard years at Great Learning came after the company looked, on paper, like it had already made it. In FY22, the year after the BYJU’S acquisition closed, Great Learning’s India entity posted a net loss of ₹307 crore against revenue of ₹313 crore — an EBITDA margin of roughly -97%, as later disclosed in regulatory filings reported by Entrackr. FY23 improved but was still a loss: revenue grew close to 25% to ₹391 crore, while the India entity’s loss narrowed. Entrackr, citing the company’s own regulatory filings, put that FY23 loss at ₹222 crore; Inc42, citing chief executive Mohan Lakhamraju directly, put the same year’s India-business loss at ₹341 crore. The two figures do not reconcile, and neither publication has revised its number, so both are reported here — the direction, not the exact figure, is the point: two years after selling for $600 million, the India business was still burning cash at a rate of roughly ₹1.57 for every rupee of operating revenue it earned in FY23.
The second setback had nothing to do with Great Learning’s own operations. In October 2023, BYJU’S — squeezed by a dispute with its Term Loan B lenders over roughly $1.2 billion of debt — began exploring a sale of Great Learning, alongside another acquired unit, Epic, to raise $800 million to $1 billion toward repayment. A company bought two years earlier as a growth asset was now a disposal item on its parent’s balance sheet, and Great Learning’s own founders found themselves negotiating, alongside outside investors, to buy back the business they had built and sold.
The turning point: the acquirer became the problem
The single event that reshaped Great Learning’s trajectory was not anything the company did. It was BYJU’S’s own collapse. Before: in 2021, BYJU’S — then India’s most valuable startup, on its way to an $18 billion valuation later that year — bought Great Learning for $600 million as one of roughly six acquisitions it made that year, spending over $2 billion in six months to bundle professional and higher education under one brand. After: by December 2025, BYJU’S’s parent, Think & Learn Pvt Ltd, was under active insolvency proceedings brought by its term-loan lenders, and Great Learning’s India entity — Great Learning Education Services Pvt Ltd — had been bought back by co-founder Mohan Lakhamraju for an estimated $10 million, a cash deal that gave him back full control. The Singapore-registered global entity, Great Learning Education Pte Ltd, stayed with receiver Kroll Pte Ltd, appointed by lenders in October 2023, in a separate sale process reportedly seeking $150–200 million.
What makes this a turning point rather than simply a bad ending is that Great Learning’s underlying business improved while its owner fell apart around it. The company says it turned consolidated-level profitable in FY24, with the founders retaining day-to-day operating control throughout — control they had specifically paid for in 2021 by accepting a lower headline price. The acquisition that was meant to be the growth event turned out to be the near-death event; staying operationally independent inside it is what let the company survive its owner’s bankruptcy instead of going down with it.
The money behind it: bootstrapped, then one enormous exit
Great Learning’s funding shape is unusual for a company that ultimately changed hands for hundreds of millions of dollars: it built its first eight years, 2013 to 2021, without the marquee venture rounds that defined most of its Indian edtech peers, relying instead on its own revenue and the founders’ networks from Great Lakes Institute of Management and their earlier careers in venture capital and private equity. The one large capital event in the company’s history is the BYJU’S transaction itself — a deal reported at $600 million, structured as a mix of cash, stock and earnout, announced 26 July 2021. According to Lakhamraju, the founders chose a lower price over a competing, larger offer specifically to keep the founding team running the company day-to-day, a condition he says spared Great Learning the integration problems that hurt other BYJU’S acquisitions whose teams and operations were absorbed into the parent.
The unusual “backer” in Great Learning’s later story was not a venture fund but BYJU’S’s own lenders. Once BYJU’S defaulted into insolvency, its term-loan creditors effectively became the counterparty Great Learning’s founders had to deal with — first as equity holders entitled to exit once repaid from the company’s cash flows (the arrangement described by the CEO in early 2025), and then, by December 2025, as sellers in an outright buyback. No other institutional backer has been named in reporting on the company; total pre-acquisition external funding, if any, has not been disclosed.
How it makes money
Revenue comes in three broad shapes: tuition-style fees from individual learners on certificate, PG diploma and online-degree programmes, often delivered jointly with a university partner that lends its brand to the content; corporate contracts sold through Great Learning for Business, where an employer rather than an individual pays for cohort-based upskilling; and, more recently, a mass-market, lower-priced tier under the Glaide brand that uses AI tutors rather than human mentors to hold down the cost of serving each additional learner. On the cost side, FY25 spending was dominated by marketing and business promotion at ₹371.2 crore — about 36% of that year’s ₹1,039 crore revenue — followed by employee benefits at ₹267.5 crore and professional and consultancy costs of ₹266.7 crore, the last of these likely including revenue-share and royalty payments to university partners.
The part outsiders tend to get wrong is assuming the premium, university-branded diploma is where the margin sits. In practice, the swing factor in Great Learning’s move from loss to profit has been customer acquisition cost, not price. Management has attributed the FY24 and FY25 turnaround to using AI to bring down what it spends to acquire each learner, rather than to raising fees or cutting headcount — the company says it avoided layoffs through its FY24 turnaround. A business spending more than a third of revenue on marketing is, structurally, an acquisition-efficiency business first and a content business second.
The numbers
Great Learning’s reported financials mix two different scopes — its India entity alone, and its consolidated global group — which is worth flagging before reading the table below, since the jump between FY23 and FY24 reflects that change in scope as much as growth.
| Metric | FY22 (India entity) | FY23 (India entity) | FY24 (consolidated group) | FY25 (consolidated group) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue from operations | ₹313 crore | ₹391 crore | ₹992 crore (company-stated $118 million) | ₹1,039 crore |
| Net profit / (loss) | (₹307 crore) | (₹222 crore) per Entrackr; (₹341 crore) per Inc42/CEO | ₹13 crore (~$1.5 million) | Operating profit ₹40.23 crore (net figure not disclosed) |
| EBITDA margin | -97% | -51% | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
Two things stand out. First, the India-only entity was still deeply loss-making as late as FY23, two years into BYJU’S ownership. Second, whichever FY23 loss figure is correct, the swing to a consolidated net profit by FY24 — and a tripling of operating profit in FY25 — happened at the same time BYJU’S itself was heading into insolvency, which is the clearest evidence that Great Learning’s turnaround was not funded or driven by its parent.
Where the money actually comes from
Despite being sold as an Indian edtech asset in 2021, Great Learning’s revenue today skews heavily overseas: the company says roughly half of its consolidated revenue now comes from the US market. Its India business alone is estimated at close to ₹500 crore a year in current reporting on the buyback — which, set against ₹1,039 crore of FY25 group revenue, is broadly consistent with a near-even India-versus-rest-of-world split, with the UK and UAE making up smaller pieces of the remainder across its 170-plus-country learner base.
On the product side, the last disclosed segment split — for the India entity in FY23 — showed digital content (self-paced course material) contributing 48% of revenue, or ₹187 crore, with the remaining 52% coming from teaching and programme support plus business support services. The surprise, for a company often described as a content platform, is that more than half its revenue is a services and support fee, not a content-licensing fee — closer to a mentored-programme business than a video-library subscription.
The risks
The first risk is reputational and legal overhang from a parent that is now in insolvency. Even with the India entity back under full founder control, four years of association with a collapsing BYJU’S, plus an unresolved receiver-led sale of the Singapore entity, leaves partners, university collaborators and enterprise buyers with a legitimate reason for caution about the brand, regardless of Great Learning’s own numbers.
The second is acquisition-cost dependency. With marketing and business promotion running at roughly 36% of FY25 revenue, Great Learning’s profitability is tied closely to the cost of paid channels — search, social and referral marketing. Its FY24–25 turnaround has come from lowering that cost through AI-assisted acquisition rather than from pricing power; if acquisition costs rise industry-wide, the same mechanism could push margins back the other way.
The third is pricing pressure from both directions: established rivals such as upGrad and Eruditus compete for the same premium, university-branded programme spend, while a fast-growing set of free and low-cost AI tutoring tools compresses the case for paying ₹2 lakh and above for a structured diploma. Great Learning’s own move into a sub-₹2,000 AI-guided tier under the Glaide brand is as much a defensive response to that pressure as a growth initiative.
The takeaway
The lesson in Great Learning’s story is not “sell high” or “stay independent” in the abstract — it is that the terms of a deal matter more than the headline number. By accepting $100 million less than an alternative offer in 2021 in exchange for keeping the founding team in operating control, Mohan Lakhamraju and his co-founders retained the ability to run their own cost base and pricing through a period when their acquirer’s balance sheet became a liability rather than an asset. When BYJU’S went into insolvency, companies that had been folded into its operations inherited its problems directly; Great Learning, still run day-to-day by the people who built it, was able to keep cutting its own losses and reach profitability on its own timetable. The transferable point for any founder selling a company: negotiate for control of the parts of the business you can still fix yourself, not just for the price.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Great Learning now?
As of December 2025, Great Learning’s India entity, Great Learning Education Services Pvt Ltd, is fully controlled by co-founder Mohan Lakhamraju, who bought it back from BYJU’S parent Think & Learn Pvt Ltd for an estimated $10 million in a cash deal. The Singapore-registered global entity, Great Learning Education Pte Ltd, remains under receiver Kroll Pte Ltd, appointed by BYJU’S lenders in October 2023, in a separate sale process reportedly seeking $150–200 million.
How much did BYJU’S pay for Great Learning?
BYJU’S acquired Great Learning for $600 million in a cash, stock and earnout deal announced 26 July 2021, as reported by Entrepreneur India and Inc42. According to founder Mohan Lakhamraju, the founders accepted about $100 million less than a competing offer in order to keep the founding team in operating control.
Is Great Learning profitable?
On a consolidated basis, yes. The company reports a net profit of about ₹13 crore (roughly $1.5 million) in FY24 and an operating profit of ₹40.23 crore in FY25 on ₹1,039 crore of revenue, after years of losses at its India entity — ₹307 crore in FY22 and either ₹222 crore (per Entrackr) or ₹341 crore (per Inc42, citing the CEO) in FY23.
Does Great Learning plan to list or raise more capital?
No, based on the most recent public statement available. Chief executive Mohan Lakhamraju told Inc42 in February 2025 that there were no plans for a capital raise or an IPO, with the stated priority being to sustain profitability instead.
What does Great Learning actually sell?
Certificate, postgraduate diploma and online degree programmes in data science, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity and business, delivered with university partners including IIT Bombay, Johns Hopkins and Duke, plus corporate upskilling contracts through Great Learning for Business and a lower-cost, AI-guided tier called Glaide priced from about ₹1,500.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrepreneur India, “BYJU’S Acquires Great Learning For $600 Mn”, July 2021
- Inc42, “Life After BYJU’S: How Great Learning Built A Profitable Future Away From The Tainted Giant”, February 2025
- Entrackr, “Byju’s-owned Great Learning nears Rs 400 Cr revenue in FY23, losses decline”, November 2023
- Entrackr, “Great Learning’s scale goes past Rs 1,039 Cr in FY25”, November 2025
- BusinessToday, “Great Learning founders in talks to buy back the company from Byju’s: Sources”, 5 October 2023
- Inc42, “Great Learning Founders In Talks With Investors To Buy The Edtech Startup Back From BYJU’S”, October 2023
- Whalesbook, “Byju’s Crisis Deepens: Great Learning India Unit Bought Back by Co-founder for a Pittance”, 18 December 2025
- Great Learning, mygreatlearning.com/about-us and mygreatlearning.com/founders/mohan-lakhamraju, accessed September 2026
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