The eponymous founder of beleaguered Byju’s on Thursday said the resignations of the three board members, who were also investor representatives, made bad times worse for the company, whose value is down to zero from $22 billion once.
Speaking to the media, Raveendran said the Term Loan B is where it all started going wrong, apart from the liquidity crunch due to the turning of the markets.
“End of May 2023, the lenders called a default and filed in Delaware. A month later, the three board members resigned. Those three resigned together; even the lenders didn’t expect it. That made it almost impossible for any fundraising. Even if they wanted to plan and resign, the company wouldn’t have been the way it is today,” he said.
In June 2023, Byju’s three directors, representing key investors, confirmed their resignations as the edtech faced lender and regulatory scrutiny.
Peak XV Partners’ GV Ravishankar, Prosus’ Russell Dreisenstock, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Vivian Wu had stepped down from the board of Byju’s parent company, Think & Learn Pvt.
He added that the mistake that the company made was to overestimate the potential growth in the next two-to-three years, but that it was the investors that pushed for aggressive growth.