Byju would like Byju's lenders to think it's worth nothing

MYSTERY POST: If hyping up works, maybe hyping down works too

That’s a 0.

There’s a lot happening with Byju’s and I honestly haven’t been able to follow all of it very well. But I will! For a future post!

In the meantime, apparently, Byju’s is worth $0? Here’s a TechCrunch piece that was widely quoted by Indian publications last month:

Byju Raveendran, the founder of the embattled edtech group Byju’s, acknowledged on Thursday afternoon that he made mistakes, mistimed the market, overestimated growth potential, and that his startup, once valued at $22 billion, is now effectively worth “zero.”

Speaking to a group of journalists, Raveendran said the company’s aggressive acquisition of more than two dozen startups to expand into new markets proved fatal when financing dried up in 2022. Byju’s was planning to go public in early 2022 with several investment bankers giving the firm valuation as high as $50 billion, TechCrunch reported earlier.

Sure, it could be that Byju’s is worth as Byju says—zero. Byju’s has a bunch of creditors, folks that it owes money, and the expected value of its assets could reasonably be lower than the money it owes. It’s not unreasonable. (As a side note, I like how a prominent creditor is the Board of Cricket Control in India. They very visibly advertised the Byju’s logo on the Indian cricket team’s jerseys and Byju’s seems to have bailed on them.)

But Byju’s, even if its main business isn’t doing well, did buy at least 17 other companies in the last couple of years and presumably at least a couple of them would be doing okay. Why then does Byju suddenly go to journalists and dramatically tell them that his company is worth nothing?

One possibility is that it wants to pit its investors against its creditors.