How the World’s Most Valuable Learning App Became a Trap
Byju’s could have been a socially relevant enterprise. But it chose to be a gigantic sales machine that has now stalled.
The learning app that failed the test.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/BloombergIn 2015, a young engineer from Kerala in south India came up with an ambitious plan to take math and science online and make it fun for the country’s stressed teenagers. But instead of remaining focused on education and technology, Byju Raveendran appended a gigantic sales machine to his edutech — with Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and soccer legend Lionel Messi as his brand ambassadors, and an army of reps hustling to sell courses to anyone downloading Byju’s — The Learning App.
And then, with the help of cheap, over-eager venture capital, he turned his eponymous organization into an acquisitions juggernaut, spending nearly $3 billion globally during the pandemic-era craze for remote learning.