Mumbai: Breaking his silence on Think & Learn Pvt Ltd’s (popularly known as Byju’s) fall from one of India’s most highly-valued edtech startups to a firm now struggling to stay afloat, founder Byju Raveendran alleged “criminal collusion” between a restructuring partner at EY India, GLAS Trust and the court-appointed interim resolution professional.
In a Linkedin post Friday, Raveendran said, he and several employees received a document with “conclusive evidence” that the three entities were colluding with each other. “I am sure a thorough investigation of this evidence will reveal the truth. I request the authorities to take that up immediately,” the 45-year-old entrepreneur said in his post.
His allegations came in the backdrop of a purported “whistleblower document” suggesting that a restructuring partner at EY India “allegedly worked simultaneously with Byju’s and GLAS while controlling” the insolvency process of the edtech firm. GLAS Trust is part of the committee of creditors (CoC) formed to vote on matters related to Byju’s insolvency.
ThePrint reached EY India for comment via email but had not received a response by the time of publication. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
Raveendran’s allegations also come after a US Bankruptcy Court in Delaware Thursday issued a damning summary judgment against his brother Riju Raveendran, the hedge fund Camshaft Capital Fund and its affiliates, and Byju’s parent firm Think & Learn. The order holds them responsible for defrauding lenders of Think & Learn’s US subsidiary, Byju’s Alpha, by executing an unlawful scheme and allegedly transferring $533 million to Camshaft, the hedge fund founded by William Morton.
GLAS Trust is an “administrative agent” that represents over a hundred Byju’s Alpha lenders and is also a party in the insolvency proceedings against Think & Learn in the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT).
Just last week, the NCLT appointed Shailendra Ajmera to assume the role of interim resolution professional for Think & Learn, which is facing insolvency proceedings. The COC recommended his appointment at the NCLT’s directions after it found alleged lapses in the conduct of Pankaj Srivastava, the former resolution professional appointed for the company, and called for disciplinary proceedings against him.
Think & Learn, once India’s hottest edtech startup valued at $22 billion in 2022, has fast fallen from grace, facing a mountain of debt, being unable to pay its employees their salaries on time, battling allegations of mismanagement from a set of its own investors, and embroiled in insolvency proceedings.
The net worth of founder Byju Raveendran, which peaked at $3.6 billion in 2022 and stood at $2.1 billion in 2023, has dropped to zero, according to the Forbes Billionaire Index 2024.
Byju’s founder: ‘I am here now’
Through most of 2023 and 2024, when Think & Learn’s fiscal health continued to deteriorate amid widening differences with a section of its investors, Raveendran mostly stayed silent, other than the occasional letter to his employees. There were even talks of the Raveendran family relocating to Dubai in a bid to escape the turmoil back home.
In Friday’s post, Raveendran said he was here now and that from now on, “you will hear it directly from me.”
“I am the Byju of BYJU’s and I am here now. I should have been here sooner but I was too busy building my company. Then I was too busy saving everything I built,” he said in his LinkedIn post. Raveendran also tried to stress on how he put himself and his family through distress to try and salvage his company.
“You have been told my family made a fortune by selling our shares. But that’s just half the story. You haven’t been told that all the fortune has been put back in our company,” he said.
Adding, “You probably know me as the man who built Byju’s. But, I am also the man who sold his house and mortgaged his family’s future. Everything that I ever owned has now been sold to keep our mission alive.”
Raveendran said he did everything in his capacity to stop the company from going under, has immense guilt for putting his family through “unimaginable misery” and for being unable to meet his commitments to his stakeholders. Last October, he had held a virtual press conference to clarify that he had not “run away” to Dubai, contrary to reports, and was there for a year for his father’s treatment and then stayed on.
Amid confusion over whether the LinkedIn post was from Raveendran’s official account, his wife and Byju’s co-founder Divya Gokulnath shared screenshots of the post with the caption, “Byju’s post and account taken down. Investigating why. But no problem. Here we go again 🙂 (An update- Original post got back up within 30 minutes of my post here).”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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