Divya Gokulnath, co-founder of the troubled ed-tech giant Byju’s and wife of Byju Raveendran, has alleged that a targeted campaign of intimidation and pressure tactics was launched to isolate her husband by threatening those close to him, including family members, colleagues and even legal counsel.
In a podcast with news agency ANI, Gokulnath stated that many individuals associated with the company, including legal teams and senior management, had faced intimidation, with unidentified individuals visiting the executives’ homes.
“The strategy we now come to understand is to try and weaken Byju by blaming and pulling everybody around him who supports him. Even our lawyers have been threatened. They’ve been told that their licence will be cancelled. I don’t want to take their names. This is the level to which we are being intimidated—or they’re trying to intimidate us by sending people to our homes,” Gokulnath alleged.
The co-founder said his biggest mistake was opting for the US$1.2 bn Term Loan B (TLB) in 2021 despite having sufficient equity-funding options.
“Only mistake, if you ask me, which created all this is that we shouldn’t have taken this when we had enough equity options. We should not have taken this term loan at that time in 2021… We had raised US$5 bn before that. We were not doing it out of desperation. It was all a collective decision,” Raveendran said.
He stated that Byju’s expanded “too fast” into 21 countries, driven by a “mandate” from its global investors to grow and transform learning, and acknowledged that a more measured approach would have been wiser.
“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 a little too soon, too fast. We went from India to 21 new countries. But if you ask me, in that context of 2019 to 2021… we had 160 investors, world-class equity investors. All of them said this was the mandate—grow, grow, grow and change the way kids learn,” he said.
Raveendran accused certain Term Loan B creditors of fabricating a narrative to seize control of the ed-tech company. He further claimed that “vulture lenders” were attempting to diminish the company’s valuation by tarnishing the founder’s identity.
He alleged that a group of lenders was conducting a hostile publicity campaign to portray him as a “fugitive” and stated that Glas Trust, a consortium of Byju’s TLB creditors, committed a “massive fraud” in collaboration with auditor EY India and the legal firm Khaitan & Co.
