Who is Byju Raveendran?

Byju Raveendran is an Indian teacher and entrepreneur from Azhikode in Kerala's Kannur district who founded Think & Learn Pvt Ltd, the company behind the BYJU'S learning app, in 2011 with his wife Divya Gokulnath. BYJU'S peaked at a US$22 billion valuation in 2022 and has been in insolvency proceedings since July 2024.

What is Byju Raveendran's net worth in 2026?

There is no reliable current estimate. Forbes listed his net worth at zero in its April 2024 billionaires list, down from US$2.1 billion a year earlier, and he has not appeared on the Hurun India Rich List since 2023. At his peak, Hurun put Byju Raveendran and family at Rs 30,600 crore in 2022.

How did Byju Raveendran start Byju's?

While working as a ship's service engineer, he coached friends for the CAT in Bangalore in 2003 and says he scored the 100th percentile. His classes grew from about 35 students to stadium audiences of 20,000, and in 2011 he and former students founded Think & Learn, which launched the BYJU'S app in August 2015.

Where is Byju Raveendran from and what did he study?

He was born in 1980 in Azhikode, a coastal village near Kannur in Kerala, to two school teachers. He studied at the Malayalam-medium Azhikode High School and earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Government College of Engineering, Kannur.

What is the Byju's controversy about?

The main disputes concern a US$1.2 billion loan taken in 2021: lenders allege about US$533 million was moved beyond their reach, and a Delaware court entered a judgment of about US$714.5 million against Raveendran in March 2026 after a default sanction, which he has appealed. Byju's parent is also in insolvency over BCCI dues, and he faces an Enforcement Directorate FEMA inquiry and a civil contempt sentence in Singapore that he is appealing. He denies wrongdoing.

Where does Byju Raveendran live now?

He has been based in Dubai since at least early 2024. He says he moved for family reasons and denies fleeing India.

Who is Byju Raveendran's wife?

His wife is Divya Gokulnath, who attended his classes in 2007, began teaching for him in 2008 and became co-founder and a director of BYJU'S.

Byju Raveendran: Byju's Founder's Rise and Fall

Key facts
Born	1980, Azhikode, Kannur district, Kerala (some profiles say 1981; he has said he does not like to reveal his age) [9] [10]
Hometown/Family roots	Azhikode, a coastal village north of Kannur; parents Raveendran (physics) and Shobhanavalli (maths) taught at the local Malayalam-medium school [11] [12]
Education	Azhikode High School; B.Tech in mechanical engineering, Government College of Engineering, Kannur [12] [9]
Family	Married to Divya Gokulnath, Byju’s co-founder; younger brother Riju Ravindran was a director of the company [13] [14]
Company/Group	Founder and former CEO of Think & Learn Pvt Ltd (BYJU’S), in insolvency proceedings since July 2024 [4]
Wealth	Forbes listed his net worth at zero in its April 2024 billionaires list (down from US$2.1 billion a year earlier); he has not been on the Hurun India Rich List since 2023, after a peak of Rs 30,600 crore (with family) in 2022 [15] [16] [17]
Known for	Turning stadium-sized CAT maths classes into BYJU’S, once India’s most valuable startup at US$22 billion, and then one of its most dramatic corporate collapses

Where it began

In 2003, a young ship’s engineer on holiday in Bangalore agreed to help a few friends who were preparing for the Common Admission Test, the entrance exam for the Indian Institutes of Management. He was good at maths, they were not, and he had time to kill. Almost as a joke, he sat the exam himself. “To my surprise, I scored in the 100th percentile,” he later recalled, “but I had no plans to do an MBA in an IIM.” [11]

Four of the twelve friends he coached cleared the exam that year [9]. Word spread. Within a few years the same man was standing at the centre of a Delhi indoor stadium, teaching maths to more than 20,000 people at once [18]. Within two decades his company, BYJU’S, would be valued at US$22 billion, sponsor the Indian cricket team and the FIFA World Cup, and sign Lionel Messi. And by 2026 it would be in insolvency, its founder living in Dubai, fighting cases on three continents.

This is the story of Byju Raveendran: one of the most gifted teachers India’s startup world has produced, and one of its most cautionary tales.

A teachers’ son in a Kannur village

Byju Raveendran was born in 1980 in Azhikode, a coastal village about 7 km north of Kannur, “where the Valapattanam River meets the Arabian Sea”, as the writer Pradip K. Saha describes it [9]. A few profiles give 1981 [19]; Raveendran himself has avoided the question [10].

His father, Raveendran Kunnaruvath, taught physics, and his mother, Shobhanavalli, taught maths, both at the Malayalam-medium Azhikode High School, which their son attended [12] [11]. “Both my parents were teachers at the school I studied,” he said in 2016 [11]. The family lived in a joint household with his father’s brother and sister and their children [11]. His paternal grandfather had been a weaver [12].

He grew up in what he calls “the bastion of Communism”, and says it shaped his attitude to money. “With a father who is a Communist, and having grown up in a village in Kannur, money is not really important to me,” he told Rediff [11]. Years later, as billions of dollars passed through his company, critics would hold that line up against him. But in the 1990s it described a modest household where learning, not wealth, was the currency.

The boy who bunked class and topped it

The paradox of Byju Raveendran’s school years is that he was often absent. He skipped classes to play and to study on his own at home. “Learning on your own is so much more efficient,” he told Rest of World in 2025 [20]. Teachers complained to his parents, who let him carry on [9]. “They never told me what to study. They just told me it was important to study well. I never misused that freedom,” he said [21]. Despite the bunking, Malayala Manorama reported, he “always came as class topper” and scored full marks in maths [21].

He was teaching long before he called it work. From about the eighth standard, older boys in the neighbourhood came to him with maths doubts [21]. He counted everything: “Like the number of electricity poles between two train stations” [12].

He learned English not in the classroom but from radio cricket commentary. “And maybe that’s also the reason I speak fast,” he joked [22]. Sport was his other education. He played almost every game at school and football, cricket and table tennis at university level [11]. “The biggest lessons I learnt from my sporting days were how to lead a team, teamwork, and how to perform under pressure … I learnt the value of controlled aggression,” he said [11].

His parents wanted a doctor [9]. He chose engineering, partly, he admits, because “medicine students hardly got time to play sports” [11]. He studied mechanical engineering at the Government College of Engineering, Kannur, graduating around 2000 [9] [12].

At sea

In 2001 he joined Pan Ocean, a UK-based shipping company, as a service engineer [23] [9]. Some profiles place him in Singapore for the job [19]. “I got a job in a multinational shipping firm and started travelling all around the world as a service engineer. It was a very challenging and exciting job,” he said [11]. By one account he visited about 40 countries in three and a half years [21].

Nothing in this part of the story points to a future billionaire. “If anyone had asked me at that time whether I would be an entrepreneur in the future, I would have said, no,” he said in 2016 [11].

The first break

“Just for fun”

The 2003 CAT episode is the founding legend of BYJU’S, and it is worth stating plainly what can and cannot be checked. Raveendran says he scored the 100th percentile and, in most tellings, did it again when he sat the exam a second time in 2005 [23] [9]. Some early accounts mention only one perfect score [10] [18]; Forbes described him as scoring “in the top 1% both times” [19]. FactorDaily, in a detailed 2017 profile, said it “couldn’t independently confirm Byju’s CAT results” [12], and Saha wrote that he tried for weeks to verify them before giving up [9]. What is not disputed is what happened next: people who sat in his classes kept bringing friends.

From 35 students to stadiums

In 2005, back in Bangalore on another break, he found that “more friends of my friends came to me for help”. “I was in Bangalore for six weeks and I might have trained more than 1,000 students during the period,” he said. “Because of the enormous response to my teaching, I didn’t go back to my job after that.” [11] Some accounts date the decision to 2006 [18].

The first proper class was held in a room at Jyoti Nivas College in Koramangala, with 35 to 40 students. The early workshops were free; students paid for advanced sessions once they liked what they saw [11] [21] [12]. Within a few sessions the audience had grown to about 1,200, and students began rolling in from Pune, Chennai and other cities [18]. An auditorium that seated 1,200 at Rs 1,000 a ticket earned more than ten times its rent when it filled — “Which is huge, right?” he told Rest of World [20].

Soon he was teaching in four cities on weekends and five on weekdays, working 12-hour days and “sleeping on the bus to the next city”, FactorDaily reported [18] [12]. At the peak, he says, he took maths workshops for 20,000 students at a time [11]; Inc42 placed one such session at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in Delhi [18]. He called them “math shows” [20]. “When you are on stage, it’s a performance,” he said [12].

He spent almost nothing to build this. “As I was a one-man army then, I didn’t have to spend any money on anything except my own efforts,” he said, adding that the first Rs 2 lakh he invested came from his own classes [11]. In 2007, “without me knowing, the brand name Byju’s Classes was created by my students” [11]. In 2009 he started recording his lectures and beaming them by satellite (VSAT) to students in cities he could not reach — an early hint of the business to come [11].

Divya Gokulnath

One of the students in his Jyoti Nivas classes in 2007 was Divya Gokulnath, a biotechnology graduate of R.V. College of Engineering who was preparing to study in the United States. “I heard from my classmates in college that there is this crazy mathematics teacher who teaches maths in a very different way,” she told Fortune India. Raveendran suggested she teach some classes herself; she gave her first in 2008 and turned down US university offers to stay [13]. She became his wife and co-founder, and a director of the company [13].

Think & Learn, and the money

In 2011 some of his former students, now graduating from the IIMs, came back to build a company with him. “We started the company Think and Learn with 25 to 30 people,” Raveendran said [11]; other accounts count a core of about eight former students as partners [21]. For four years they built content for school students rather than test-takers, because, he said, “most of the students lacked conceptual clarity and a proper foundation” [11]. “We created each chapter in a subject like a movie.” [11]

The first institutional money came from Aarin Capital, the fund of Manipal’s Ranjan Pai and former Infosys executive T.V. Mohandas Pai, in 2013. Accounts of how Pai found him differ, but all involve a packed Byju’s session in Manipal [11] [21]. Reported amounts range from about US$8 million to US$10 million (Rs 50-55 crore) [19] [21]. “But when he asked me for $8 million, I nearly fell off my chair,” Ranjan Pai told Forbes [19]. Mohandas Pai called Raveendran “a natural genius” [10]. Sequoia Capital India followed with about US$25 million in 2015 [20], and Sequoia and Belgium’s Sofina put in US$75 million in early 2016 [24].

In August 2015 the company launched BYJU’S – The Learning App [11]. Within a year it had 5.5 million downloads and more than 250,000 paying subscribers on annual plans [11]. In FY2016 the company reported revenue of about Rs 108 crore [12]. The teacher who said he had “never addressed any group of even ten” in college now had a classroom that fit in a pocket [11].

Building the empire

Mark Zuckerberg’s first Asian bet

In September 2016 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy of Facebook’s founder and his wife, led a US$50 million round in BYJU’S — its first investment in Asia [25]. Tencent followed in 2017. In December 2018 a US$540 million round led by Naspers valued the company at about US$3.6 billion, making it the world’s most valuable edtech company at the time [26]. Shah Rukh Khan became its brand ambassador in 2017 [27].

In January 2019 BYJU’S bought Osmo, a US maker of learning games for children, for US$120 million in stock — Raveendran called it his “most important” deal [28]. In July 2019 a US$150 million round led by the Qatar Investment Authority valued BYJU’S at about US$5.5-5.7 billion [29] [30]. With about 21% of the company (the family held about 35%), the Kerala teacher was now a paper billionaire [30]. The app had 35 million registered users and 2.4 million paying ones [30]. That month BYJU’S also took over Oppo’s sponsorship of the Indian cricket team’s jersey, from September 2019 [31].

The accounting already showed the pattern that would later matter. For FY19 the company publicised a “net profit of Rs 20 crore”; that was the standalone figure. On a consolidated basis the group lost Rs 8.82 crore, on revenue of Rs 1,306 crore [32].

The lockdown boom

Then came COVID-19. When schools shut in March 2020, BYJU’S made its app free. More than six million new students joined that month alone [33]. “The outbreak is clearly increasing the appreciation of online education,” Raveendran told CNN. “This could be a turning point for the industry.” [34] By September 2020 it had more than 64 million registered students and 4.2 million annual paid subscriptions, and a US$500 million round led by Silver Lake valued it at US$10.8 billion [35]. “Our classrooms are changing possibly for the first time in 100 years,” he said [35].

BYJU’S also won the Business Transformation category of EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 awards in India; the overall winner was Marico’s Harsh Mariwala [7].

Buying the market

Raveendran used the money to buy. The main deals, with reported prices:

Year	Company	What it was	Reported price
2019	Osmo (US)	Learning games	US$120 million, all stock [28]
2020	WhiteHat Jr	Online coding classes for children	US$300 million, all cash [36]
2021	Aakash Educational Services	Offline test-prep chain	About US$950 million; last instalment of Rs 1,983 crore paid to Blackstone in Sep 2022 [37] [38]
2021	Epic! (US)	Digital reading platform	US$500 million [39]
2021	Great Learning (Singapore)	Professional upskilling	About US$600 million [40]
2021	Toppr	School learning app	About US$150 million [40]
2021	GeoGebra (Austria)	Maths software	About US$100 million (undisclosed officially) [41]

Forbes counted about US$2.4 billion of acquisitions in 2021 alone [37]. “We have multibillion dollar opportunities for growth in India and the U.S.,” Raveendran told Forbes that October, when he was worth about US$4 billion on its real-time list [37]. On the Hurun India Rich List, “Byju Raveendran & family” were at Rs 24,300 crore in 2021 [42] and Rs 30,600 crore in 2022 [17].

The loan, the SPAC and the US$22 billion peak

In November 2021 BYJU’S raised a US$1.2 billion “Term Loan B” from US institutional investors, upsized from US$700 million because of demand, for use outside India including acquisitions in North America [43]. The borrower was a Delaware vehicle, BYJU’S Alpha Inc. [3]. Raveendran would later call this the decision that undid everything.

In December 2021 Bloomberg reported that BYJU’S was in talks to go public in the US through a merger with one of Churchill Capital’s blank-cheque companies, at a valuation of more than US$40 billion [44]. The deal was never signed.

In March 2022 BYJU’S announced an US$800 million round at a valuation of US$22 billion — its peak. Half of it, US$400 million, was to come from Raveendran himself, lifting his stake to about 25% [45]. TechCrunch reported he funded it with a loan from international banks against about 2% of his BYJU’S shares [46]. “Our aspiration is to build something that will last for decades,” he said [45]. The same month BYJU’S became an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, and in November 2022 it named Lionel Messi global ambassador of its Education for All programme [27].

But the round never fully closed. By July 2022 Bloomberg reported that BYJU’S was struggling to collect the money as investors balked in a global tech sell-off [47]. Raveendran later said “700 million of committed capital; signed committed capital didn’t turn up” [48]. The empire had reached its widest point just as the tide went out.

The setbacks and failures

The numbers catch up

Students went back to classrooms in 2022, and the accounts finally arrived. BYJU’S filed its FY21 results about 18 months late, in September 2022, after its auditor Deloitte required a change in how revenue was recognised. The loss came to Rs 4,588 crore on revenue of Rs 2,428 crore — roughly ten times what the company had lost in all previous years combined [49]. Raveendran said the change “pushed out or deferred revenues of almost more than 40 per cent” [49]. At the same time the company was telling the press it had earned “nearly Rs 10,000 crore” gross revenue in FY22 [50]. When FY22’s audited accounts were finally filed in January 2024, they showed total income of Rs 5,298 crore and a loss of Rs 8,245 crore, on expenses of Rs 13,668 crore, including Rs 4,144 crore on advertising [51] [52].

At a Forbes conference in September 2022 Raveendran was defiant: “I’m going all in.” [53] A month later the company announced about 2,500 job cuts [54].

2023: the dominoes

In 2023 almost everything that could go wrong did:

March: lenders on the US$1.2 billion loan declared a default and took control of BYJU’S Alpha [3].
April: the Enforcement Directorate searched premises in Bengaluru [55].
June: BYJU’S skipped a roughly US$40 million interest payment and sued its lenders in New York [56]. On 22 June Deloitte resigned as auditor, saying it had not received the FY22 statements [57]. The next day Prosus, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative confirmed their board representatives had quit, leaving a board of Raveendran, Gokulnath and Riju Ravindran [14].
July: Forbes said Raveendran was no longer a billionaire as investors marked down their stakes [58]. BlackRock, which had invested at the US$22 billion valuation, cut its estimate repeatedly [58] [16].
October: he dropped off the Hurun India Rich List [16].
November-December: salaries were delayed. Bloomberg reported he pledged family homes in Bengaluru and an under-construction villa to borrow money for payroll [59].

A July 2023 analysis of filings by PrivateCircle, reported by Business Standard, found that the founders had sold about US$408.5 million of shares in secondary deals since 2015-16 — most of it by Riju Ravindran, with about US$3.3 million by Raveendran himself. BYJU’S said all of it had been reinvested in the company [60]. Raveendran has since argued that his family put more than Rs 5,000 crore of personal wealth back into BYJU’S [61]. “You haven’t been told that all that ‘fortune’ has been put back into our company,” he wrote in 2025 [62].

2024: the collapse

In January 2024 BYJU’S launched a US$200 million rights issue at an implied valuation of roughly US$220-225 million — a cut of more than 99% from the peak [63]. In February, investors voted at an extraordinary general meeting to remove him [64]. “I have been moving mountains for months to make payroll,” he wrote to staff that month [65]. In April, Forbes listed his net worth as zero [15]. In July 2024 the company’s Indian parent was admitted into insolvency on a claim by the BCCI [4].

Headcount, which Rest of World put at about 60,000 in 2022, had fallen to about 14,000 by early 2024 [20]. In October 2024, speaking to journalists by video from Dubai, Raveendran said of the company he built: “It’s worth zero. What valuation are you talking about? It’s worth zero.” [66]

What he says went wrong

Raveendran’s own diagnosis has been consistent: the company expanded too fast, and above all it took the term loan. “The only mistake, which created all this, is that we shouldn’t have taken this, when we had enough equity options … we shouldn’t have taken this term loan at that time in 2021,” he told ANI in May 2025 [48]. “We were growing a little too soon, too fast.” [48] He has also blamed investors who, he says, “ran away” at the first sign of trouble [66] and “vulture lenders” [48]. His critics — lenders, former investors and several courts — point to governance, disclosure and the handling of the loan money, set out below.

Controversies and allegations

This section sets out the main allegations and legal proceedings involving Byju Raveendran and BYJU’S, who made them, the responses, and where each stands. Raveendran denies wrongdoing in every matter. As of the date of this profile he has not been convicted of any crime in any country.

Sales practices and alleged mis-selling

Allegation: In December 2021 a BBC investigation reported parents’ complaints that promised tutoring did not materialise, of relentless sales calls and pressure that their children “would fall behind”, and of difficulty getting refunds; former staff described a high-pressure sales culture. The BBC said consumer courts had ordered BYJU’S to pay damages in at least three cases [67]. A December 2022 investigation by the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Context, based on interviews with 22 customers and 26 current and former staff, alleged door-to-door selling to low-income families and loans signed without parents understanding them [68]. On 16 December 2022 the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights summoned Raveendran over reports of hard-selling and families pushed into debt [69]. In October 2022 Kerala’s labour minister ordered a probe into alleged forced resignations at the company’s Thiruvananthapuram office [54].

Response: BYJU’S told the BBC that families buy only when they “see value” and that its sales targets were “rigorous but fair” [67]. It told Context it “strongly refuted” mis-selling claims, citing an investor-commissioned audit and its refund policy [68], and said it would give NCPCR a “fact-based response” to “unsubstantiated complaints” [69]. It denied forced resignations [54]. In 2025 Raveendran said: “A few hundred of the tens of thousands of salespeople made mistakes, but we corrected them,” and apologised to any student who had missed out, promising compensation [70].

Status: No regulator has made a finding of systemic mis-selling against Raveendran personally that this profile could find. Individual consumer-court orders exist.

Accounts, revenue claims and the auditor’s exit

Allegation: Critics and investors pointed to repeatedly delayed audited accounts, a large gap between BYJU’S public revenue claims and audited figures (a claimed “nearly Rs 10,000 crore” gross for FY22 against audited total income of Rs 5,298 crore), and Deloitte’s resignation in June 2023 on the ground that it had not received the FY22 statements [50] [51] [57]. When the FY22 accounts were filed, the new auditor flagged a material uncertainty about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern [52].

Response: BYJU’S said the FY21 restatement reflected a more conservative revenue-recognition policy agreed with Deloitte and that Deloitte gave an unqualified opinion on FY21 [50] [49]. It said board members left because investor stakes fell below thresholds in the shareholders’ agreement [14].

Status: Historical; the accounts were eventually filed. No penalty arising specifically from the delays was found in the sources reviewed.

The US$1.2 billion loan and the missing US$533 million

Allegation: Lenders on the November 2021 Term Loan B, acting through their agent GLAS Trust, said BYJU’S breached the loan’s terms, accelerated it in March 2023 and installed their own director, Timothy Pohl, at BYJU’S Alpha [3] [71]. They alleged that in 2022, about US$533 million of loan money had been moved from Alpha to Camshaft Capital Fund, a small Miami hedge fund, and then shifted to other group entities beyond their reach [3] [8]. The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit later noted that Camshaft’s address on file with the SEC was a Miami IHOP restaurant and that its founder, William Morton, appeared to be its only employee [3].

Response: BYJU’S called the lenders’ tactics “predatory” and stopped payments while it challenged the acceleration in New York [56]. Raveendran has said the money was used for the group, not taken by the founders; that he followed bankers’ advice and did not know Camshaft; and that “neither I nor any of the founders personally received any portion of the disputed funds” [20] [61]. His side says about US$475 million or more of Think & Learn shares were bought by founder-controlled entities in the same period [72].

What happened next:

November 2023: the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled that the lenders had validly declared a default and could replace BYJU’S nominee at Alpha [73]. The Delaware Supreme Court affirmed in September 2024 [74].
February 2024: BYJU’S Alpha, under lender control, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware [3].
March 2024: Judge John Dorsey ordered the US$533 million frozen, held Camshaft and Morton in contempt, and said he did not believe Riju Ravindran’s claim that he could not say where the money was [75] [3]. In August 2024 Riju Ravindran was fined US$10,000 a day for contempt until he helped locate it [76].
February 2025: the bankruptcy court granted summary judgment that the transfers were actual fraudulent transfers, and found Riju Ravindran breached his duties as a director; Think & Learn and the Camshaft entities were also held liable. The defendants appealed [77] [20].
June 2026: the Third Circuit upheld the contempt finding against Morton [3].

Status: The lenders’ control of BYJU’S Alpha is final. The fraudulent-transfer findings against Riju Ravindran, Think & Learn and Camshaft were under appeal at last report. Byju Raveendran’s personal case is set out next.

The Delaware case against Byju Raveendran personally

Allegation: In April 2025 BYJU’S Alpha, backed by the lenders, sued Byju Raveendran, Divya Gokulnath and an executive, Anita Kishore, in the Delaware bankruptcy court, alleging breach of fiduciary duty, conversion and conspiracy over the US$533 million [8] [1].

Response: Raveendran argued the US court had no jurisdiction over him and that he had not been properly served [1]. When the court later entered judgment, he called it “premature”, said he had been refused the time he needed to hire US lawyers, accused GLAS of misleading the court and said he would appeal [78] [72]. He also announced claims of at least US$2.5 billion against GLAS and others [79]; TechCrunch reported in November 2025 that no such filing had publicly surfaced [78].

What happened next:

7 July 2025: the court held him in civil contempt for failing to comply with a discovery order and fined him US$10,000 a day [1] [80].
20 November 2025: Judge Brendan Shannon granted a default judgment against him as a penalty for discovery failures, describing “a strategic pattern of wilful failure to comply”. Reports put the sums at about US$1.07 billion [72] [78]. On 8 December 2025 the court amended its opinion and set a separate briefing on damages [1] [81].
19 March 2026: the court entered a Judgment Order holding that “Raveendran is liable to Plaintiffs in the amount of $714,544,223.60 as of January 21, 2026”, plus interest and costs [1]. In an accompanying order the court said his liability “has been established by the entry of the default sanction” and that damages would be decided on the written record [2]. Lenders had put the figure at about US$715 million [82].
2 April 2026: he appealed the judgment to the US District Court for the District of Delaware. On 31 July 2026 that court refused separate interlocutory appeals, noting that his appeal of the final judgment — which covers his arguments on service and jurisdiction — was already pending [1].

Status: A US court judgment of about US$714.5 million stands against him, under appeal, as of 23 October 2026. Gokulnath has also denied wrongdoing [78].

Enforcement Directorate (FEMA) inquiry

Allegation: On 29 April 2023 the Enforcement Directorate searched three premises in Bengaluru linked to Raveendran and Think & Learn under the Foreign Exchange Management Act. The ED said the company had received about Rs 28,000 crore of foreign investment between 2011 and 2023 and sent about Rs 9,754 crore abroad, and that it had not prepared audited accounts since FY21 [55]. In November 2023 the ED said it had issued a show-cause notice alleging FEMA contraventions of Rs 9,362.35 crore [83]. In February 2024 a look-out circular against Raveendran was upgraded so that he could not leave India without informing investigators; he was reported to be in Dubai at the time [84].

Response: “BYJU’S has brought more FDI to India than any other Indian startup,” Raveendran wrote to staff after the searches, saying the company had made “all efforts to fully comply” and was cooperating [85]. BYJU’S first denied receiving a notice, then said a legal review had found no violations [83]. In 2025 he said: “We were traveling to India as required, using Dubai as a base for international operations.” [86]

Status: FEMA proceedings are civil, not criminal. No final adjudication order was found in public reporting as of October 2026.

The shareholder revolt and the rights issue

Allegation: In February 2024, at an extraordinary general meeting called by investors including Prosus, General Atlantic and Peak XV, shareholders voted to remove Raveendran and his family from control, citing governance and compliance failures [64]. Four investors also asked the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to declare the founders unfit, order a forensic audit and void the US$200 million rights issue [87].

Response: BYJU’S called the resolutions “invalid and ineffective” and passed by “a small cohort of select shareholders” [64]. The Karnataka High Court had ordered that they not be given effect pending a hearing [64]. On the rights issue, Raveendran said the money was “essential to prevent any further value impairment” [63].

What happened next:

The NCLT ordered rights-issue money kept in escrow and, in June 2024, ordered status quo on shareholding [88].

Status: The EGM resolutions were never given effect. These disputes have been overtaken by the insolvency, under which the founders’ board powers are suspended.

The BCCI dues and the insolvency of Think & Learn

Allegation: The Board of Control for Cricket in India said BYJU’S owed about Rs 158.9 crore in team-sponsorship dues. On 16 July 2024 the NCLT in Bengaluru admitted Think & Learn into the corporate insolvency resolution process [4].

Response: Riju Ravindran agreed to pay the BCCI from his personal funds, and on 2 August 2024 the appellate tribunal (NCLAT) approved the settlement and ended the insolvency [89]. GLAS opposed this, calling the money “tainted” [90]. Raveendran has called the insolvency “a corporate raid” by “opportunistic secondary debt buyers, masquerading as lenders” [91].

What happened next:

23 October 2024: the Supreme Court set aside the NCLAT order, holding that a settlement had to go through the statutory route involving creditors, and made no finding on anyone’s conduct [4].
February 2025: the NCLT replaced the interim resolution professional with Shailendra Ajmera [6]. In February 2026 the insolvency regulator, IBBI, suspended the former resolution professional for three years for, among other things, reconstituting the creditors’ committee without authority [6].
April 2025: NCLAT said the creditors were free to accept or reject the BCCI settlement [90]. Raveendran filed a police complaint in India against the former resolution professional, GLAS representatives and EY staff alleging a conspiracy; GLAS called it “baseless and fabricated” [92].
November 2025: the first bid process drew a single bid, from Ranjan Pai’s Manipal group, reports said [93].
4 May 2026: the Supreme Court dismissed Raveendran’s appeal against the restoration of the original creditors’ committee, in which GLAS holds a dominant vote [5].
July 2026: on the founders’ challenge to GLAS’s admitted claim of about Rs 11,433 crore, the NCLT paused the bidding process; the founders noted the insolvency was on day 735 against a 330-day statutory limit [94]. In August 2026 the tribunal ordered status quo on hardware auctioned by the resolution professional after a related BYJU’S unit claimed goods worth about Rs 150 crore had been sold for about Rs 16 crore [95].

Status: As of 23 October 2026 the insolvency is continuing. No resolution plan has been approved and no liquidation has been ordered.

Aakash, Qatar Holding and the Singapore contempt sentence

Allegation: In 2022 Qatar Holding, a unit of the Qatar Investment Authority, provided US$150 million, personally guaranteed by Raveendran, to his Singapore company BYJU’S Investments to buy about 17.89 million Aakash shares. Qatar Holding alleged defaults and that the shares were moved to another Raveendran company, Beeaar Investco, in breach of the agreement [96] [97]. An arbitration award of July 2025 ordered more than US$235 million to be paid [96]. On 25 May 2026 the Singapore High Court held Raveendran in civil contempt for failing since 2024 to comply with orders to disclose his assets, and sentenced him to six months in jail, with about S$90,000 in costs [98] [99].

Response: Raveendran called it “a procedural contempt of court order … not a finding of fraud, dishonesty, or any wrongdoing on the merits”, said “there has been no wrongdoing on my part or on the part of the other founders”, and that “a settlement has been agreed in principle” [99]. He appealed [61].

What happened next:

10 June 2026: the High Court temporarily stayed the order to surrender [61]. In July it declined to extend the stay; the appeal against the contempt finding remained pending [100] [101].
September 2026: Raveendran reportedly offered to give up his claimed beneficial interest in the 17.89 million Aakash shares, about 5.7% of Aakash, to settle Qatar Holding’s claim [97].

Status: The sentence is civil, not criminal, and is under appeal; he lives outside Singapore. Separately, Aakash itself has changed hands: Ranjan Pai’s Manipal group became a major shareholder in late 2023 [102], the Supreme Court allowed an Aakash rights issue in November 2025 that threatened to dilute Think & Learn’s 25.75% stake [103], and in September 2026 Think & Learn and Aakash told the NCLT they had settled that dispute [104]. The Economic Times reported, as cited by Inc42, that Think & Learn would hold about 32% of Aakash once the settlement is implemented [97]. Reuters reported in June 2026 that lenders were in talks to take about 30% of Aakash in a wider settlement under which all parties would withdraw cases [105]. No signed global settlement had been reported as of 23 October 2026.

Giving back

BYJU’S main social programme was Education for All, launched on 16 September 2020 with NGO partners including the American India Foundation, Magic Bus, Save the Children and United Way, to bring digital learning to children from underserved communities. “With ‘Education for All’, we want to ensure that all children get an equal opportunity to learn,” Raveendran said at the launch [106]. In November 2022 Lionel Messi became the programme’s global ambassador [27].

During the 2020 lockdown, the company’s decision to open its app free to all students, which the company said brought in more than 20 million new learners, was both a public service and the most effective marketing campaign in its history [106] [33].

This profile found no credible record of large personal philanthropic pledges by Raveendran on the scale of other Indian billionaires of his era. His own account of giving back is different: he says his family put more than Rs 5,000 crore of personal wealth back into BYJU’S and borrowed against family homes to pay salaries [61] [59].

Later life and the comeback plan

Raveendran has lived in Dubai since at least early 2024, saying he moved for family reasons and denying that he fled India [84] [20] [86]. He told Rest of World, which spent two days with him there in 2025, that his house is rented and that he works from a coworking space [20].

He insists he will return to teaching at scale. “I will make a comeback, and nobody can stop me from completing my mission,” he said in October 2024 [107]. In May 2025 he announced “BYJU’S 3.0”, an AI-led, leaner relaunch: “There is now an opportunity to almost productise the service part — one personal tutor for every student.” [70] “We don’t belong in courtrooms. We belong in classrooms,” he said [70]. As of October 2026 no independent reporting reviewed for this profile showed a working product at scale. “The moment I start teaching, I’m sure I will fill stadiums again,” he told Rest of World [20].

Succession

In the usual sense, there is no succession to discuss. Think & Learn is run by a court-appointed resolution professional, the founders’ board powers are suspended, BYJU’S Alpha is controlled by its US lenders, and Aakash is run by its own management with Manipal as a major shareholder [4] [3] [102]. Divya Gokulnath, the co-founder, is a defendant with him in the Delaware suit and denies the claims [8]. Whatever Raveendran builds next would be a new company.

What their journey teaches

A gift for explaining is a real business asset. Raveendran’s first business needed almost no capital: Rs 2 lakh of his own money, a rented hall and an ability to make maths click for thousands of people at once [11]. Before any investor arrived, students were paying, coming back and bringing friends. That is the strongest form of validation any founder can have.

Growth bought with debt has a fixed due date. The US$1.2 billion term loan came with covenants that equity does not. When growth slowed, the lenders, not the founder, decided what happened next. Raveendran himself now calls taking it “the only mistake” [48]. Founders choosing between “cheap” debt and dilution should price in what happens in a bad year.

Audited numbers are the only numbers that count. A publicised Rs 20 crore profit that was a standalone figure, a claimed Rs 10,000 crore gross revenue against an audited Rs 5,298 crore, and accounts filed 18 to 22 months late each cost credibility that was impossible to rebuild when trouble came [32] [50] [51].

A board is a safety net, not a formality. When the investor directors walked out in June 2023, the board was left with three family members [14]. Strong independent directors and a timely auditor are what lenders, regulators and new investors look for first when they decide whether to trust a company in a crisis.

Going global is many companies, not one. In two years BYJU’S bought businesses in coding, reading, upskilling, offline coaching and maths software across several countries [37]. “We tried expanding from India to the whole world … We were growing a little too soon, too fast,” Raveendran said [48]. Each acquisition had to be integrated just as the post-pandemic market turned.

Engaging with the legal process beats fighting it from outside. Several of the heaviest outcomes against Raveendran — the US contempt fines, the default judgment and the Singapore sentence — followed from failures to comply with disclosure orders rather than from trials on the merits [1] [2] [99]. Whatever one thinks of the underlying dispute, procedural defaults turned it into personal liability.

For other founder stories from the same era, read about Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Sachin Bansal of Flipkart, Ritesh Agarwal of OYO and Nithin Kamath, who built Zerodha without any venture capital. For the state of startup funding today, see CapitalVia’s insight on how Indian startups raised US$5.2 billion in the first half of 2026.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 23 October 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.

Byju Raveendran: Byju's Founder's Rise and Fall

Where it began

A teachers’ son in a Kannur village

The boy who bunked class and topped it

At sea

The first break

“Just for fun”

From 35 students to stadiums

Divya Gokulnath

Think & Learn, and the money

Building the empire

Mark Zuckerberg’s first Asian bet

The lockdown boom

Buying the market

The loan, the SPAC and the US$22 billion peak

The setbacks and failures

The numbers catch up

2023: the dominoes

2024: the collapse

What he says went wrong

Controversies and allegations

Sales practices and alleged mis-selling

Accounts, revenue claims and the auditor’s exit

The US$1.2 billion loan and the missing US$533 million

The Delaware case against Byju Raveendran personally

Enforcement Directorate (FEMA) inquiry

The shareholder revolt and the rights issue

The BCCI dues and the insolvency of Think & Learn

Aakash, Qatar Holding and the Singapore contempt sentence

Giving back

Later life and the comeback plan

Succession

What their journey teaches

Sources (107)

Frequently asked questions

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