The unravelling of Byju’s billion-dollar empire

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

One morning in January, Byju Raveendran sat in the back seat of his shiny black Cadillac as it sped through Dubai. Just three years prior, the schoolteachers’ son had appeared on the Forbes list of richest Indians as founder and CEO of Byju’s, then one of the world’s most valuable education technology companies. He was dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, while his driver, Hashim, was more formally attired in a collared shirt. Raveendran, square-jawed and muscular at 45, told me he typically rides beside Hashim in the passenger seat, seeming intent on underscoring his down-to-earthness. “I always sit there, no, Hashim?” he asked, with a boyish laugh. Hashim nodded.

Former Byju’s employees had told me about Raveendran’s love for staying at the world’s finest hotels, and the upscale properties and luxury cars his family owned when he was based in Bengaluru. I’d heard his wife and co-founder, Divya Gokulnath, described as a jet-setter who networked with Silicon Valley elites.

But beyond the Cadillac, Raveendran didn’t seem keen for me to get a glimpse of his wealth. He was facing accusations of defrauding US lenders for hundreds of millions of dollars, while tens of thousands of his employees had been laid off. I’d hoped to be invited to his home – one source told me it was a mansion in a gated community of Dubai. Instead, he showed up at my hotel on short notice to take me to a South Indian restaurant for a simple breakfast of idli, vada, and sambar – his staple meal during a modest upbringing in a village in Kerala.

Raveendran wanted to show he hadn’t let success get to his head, and wouldn’t let his company’s staggering problems, either. He was defiant that his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t over yet. “Why I am confident of a comeback is that the most valuable thing I had is still with me,” he said, referring to himself.

Byju’s, launched in 2011, developed into a learning app that quickly became one of the best known brands across India. It made Raveendran a pioneer in the rapidly expanding sector of educational technology, in a country with a massive appetite for education solutions. By 2017, marquee investors like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had vaulted Byju’s into the upper echelons of global edtech companies, sparking a worldwide acquisitions spree. In 2022, the company was valued at about $22 billion, with roughly 60,000 employees and millions of paying users.

But things unraveled – slowly at first, and then all of a sudden. In September 2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India took Byju’s to court for defaulting on a $19 million sponsorship payment. BCCI’s complaint came just months after news that Byju’s had allegedly defaulted on a $1.2 billion loan from US lenders. They sued Byju’s parent company, Think and Learn, in a bankruptcy court in Delaware. The details included in that suit were shocking: the plaintiffs alleged that $533 million of the loan had been siphoned to a sham hedge fund once registered at the address of an International House of Pancakes restaurant in Miami. The fund was run by a 23-year-old with seemingly no relevant educational or professional experience, who’d purportedly spent part of the funds on a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, and a Rolls-Royce.

Three of Byju’s biggest investors, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, had subsequently resigned from the company’s board. At a press briefing in October 2024, Raveendran lamented that the legal troubles and investor exits had all but destroyed the company. “It’s worth zero,” he declared.

The Delaware case was nearing conclusion when I visited Raveendran in Dubai, where he’d moved, he has said, for his father’s medical treatment. Even though Think and Learn and various educational companies in the Byju’s empire were still operating, Raveendran no longer had control over them, pending the US and Indian court proceedings. As we raced toward the restaurant, he insisted the allegations of theft were baseless – echoing a statement he’d made when I’d first called him. His company’s troubles, he said, had simply resulted from “trying to grow too soon, too fast”.

Through nearly five hours of interviews over two days, he refused to take responsibility for the company’s legal and financial woes, painting himself as a victim of a conspiracy by US lenders. And while all the court documents I’d read seemed starkly damning, listening to Raveendran argue his case in person made me occasionally wonder if he had indeed been wronged. He is persuasive because his earnestness doesn’t feel like a put-on.

Sitting across from me at a table for two, he sketched a diagram of little arrows on a paper napkin to provide an alternative explanation for the missing funds. I didn’t fully understand the accounting he was relaying, but the presentation evoked his past as a tutor who’d once filled stadiums by simplifying difficult math problems with slides of diagrams and equations. I could just as easily imagine his talent at pitching to investors, where a self-confidence that seemed to edge on delusion might come off as visionary.

As the waiter cleared our plates, Raveendran told me he expected to regain control of his company. “Worst-case scenario, if we don’t get control back, we’ll launch everything through a new platform.”

Raveendran grew up in Azhikode, a small village in Kerala. He watched his grandfather toil on the family farm to grow paddy even at the age of 90, he told me when we sat down to talk inside a plush conference room in a Dubai high-rise where he rents a coworking space. Kerala has the highest literacy rate among Indian states, and Raveendran’s parents, both college-educated, were teachers at the school he attended: His father taught physics and his mother taught math.

As a kid, Raveendran told me, he loved math – and his seventh-grade math teacher once even asked him to lead the class while she was away. “Otherwise I was an introvert,” Raveendran said. “But the moment I started teaching math, I saw the value that I was giving.”

Raveendran often skipped class to play sports, which meant he had to catch up on schoolwork on his own at home. This, he said, showed him the power of self-education – the basis for his app years later. “Learning on your own is so much more efficient” than being taught in school, he said.

Raveendran studied mechanical engineering at a nearby college, then spent a few years servicing mechanical systems on ships. During a visit to Bengaluru in 2003, some friends who were there working IT jobs asked if he’d coach them for an entrance test for the elite Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), whose MBAs are highly prized in the international job market. Eventually, the lessons moved to a classroom at a local college, Raveendran said. “Once I started doing that – and it was free, this is not business, I was doing it for fun – they started bringing their friends.”

Raveendran built a reputation as an extraordinary teacher, breaking down complicated material into simple, digestible morsels. In addition to drilling on fundamentals, he provided novel shortcuts for solving problems and techniques for smarter test-taking. He would teach students how to identify patterns so they could solve problems faster. “He made me visualise the whole problem and taught me tips and hacks to find answers quickly by reverse engineering,” a former student, Ankit Uttam, wrote on LinkedIn in 2023. “It was a novel way of learning for me.”

When I looked up some of Raveendran’s lectures on YouTube, I could see what he meant. In one video, he shows how to compute the area of two regions marked on a diagram of a square nested within a circle nested within another square. The typical way to solve the problem requires several computation steps, including the use of pi. But Raveendran simplifies it by reorienting the inner square so the area to be computed suddenly becomes a triangle.

Eventually, Raveendran told me, he rented an auditorium with a seating capacity of 1,200 and began charging Rs 1,000 per ticket – around $20 at the time – to cover rentals. When the auditorium started to fill to capacity, it generated more than 10 times the rent. “Which is huge, right?” he remarked, smiling.

As word spread – both of Raveendran’s instructional prowess, and the success of some of his pupils – demand rose. The competition to enroll in engineering and medical colleges in India is fierce: vast numbers of students in the country view becoming an engineer or a doctor as a guarantee of a comfortable life. The competition to secure a slot in an MBA program is just as tough. A group of students in Chennai wanted Raveendran in their city, so he began flying there weekly. By 2006, he told me, he was traveling to nine cities across India per week, rushing from airports to college auditoriums where hundreds of eager students waited, pencils at the ready.

When the auditoriums proved too small, Raveendran rented sports stadiums that could seat up to 25,000 students. His slides were projected on big screens surrounding the stage. Nobody had seen anything like this, one former student told me. “People would be glued to the screens [while he taught],” this person said. Raveendran referred to them as “math shows”.

The former student eventually joined the company, was close to Raveendran’s inner circle, and became one of the company’s most senior executives before leaving in 2024. He recalled being awestruck by Raveendran when he first saw him teach. (Like several other former employees I spoke to, this individual would speak about Raveendran and Byju’s only on condition of anonymity. He agreed to be identified by one of his initials, S.) Raveendran was very confident, S told me. “It was easy to get wowed by his persona. … When you’re sitting in his class, the guy is teaching you math in a way that it has never been brought to you. You’ll be amazed. You’ll be floored.”

Aside from the logistical challenge of accommodating so many students in a single class, Raveendran told me teaching dozens or hundreds of students at once was straightforward. “There is no difference the moment you have more than 50 students in a class,” he said. “See, if class is happening through group discussions and case study, that’s different. … But if there are 1,000 students, they wouldn’t even see me properly.” The communication had to be one-way. His instruction had to anticipate every possible question students might think to ask – a skill that would later help him shape his learning app. The other advantage he took from these stadium-sized classes was building a larger-than-life image for himself as a pioneer in education.

In 2009, distance learning was taking off around the world, powered by the rise of broadband internet and the advent of smartphones. Raveendran began recording his lectures on video and broadcasting them on screens at some 40 learning centres across India. He told me students were willing to pay the same fee to attend video lectures as they were for in-person instruction.

A few of his former best students had joined him by now to become part of the company. They began to expand the business, adding a new market of high-school students looking to improve their math skills for all manner of competitive college entrance tests. This also meant raising the bar for the video content: Simple recordings of his lectures, Raveendran realised, wouldn’t be enough to keep younger students engaged. “We needed to create movie-like videos and game-like interactions,” he told me. In 2011, he founded Think and Learn, whose goal was to create instructional content that would appeal to students from kindergarten to high school.

S, the former student-turned-executive, told me Raveendran’s presence in the classroom transferred easily into the entrepreneurial context. “If you met him for half an hour, you would feel that you could conquer the world, that there was nothing that was impossible,” he said. Like the 50 or so employees Raveendran had gathered around himself in the early years of the company, S became a believer in the mission Raveendran said he was pursuing: revolutionising education.

In 2013, Aarin Capital, led by Indian business tycoons Ranjan Pai and Mohandas Pai, was the first investor in Byju’s, with about $8 million. “Once we got access to capital, we were able to accelerate product development and content development,” Raveendran told me. That was followed by $25 million from the Indian arm of the US venture capital giant Sequoia Capital. In August 2015, Think and Learn launched the Byju’s learning app, offering recorded lectures integrated with virtual demonstrations, animations, and games. Subscribers could access the content with plans that cost Rs 2,500 – Rs 50,000, or about $40-$780 back then. Within months, millions of Indians had downloaded the app. Within a year, Byju’s had acquired some 300,000 paying subscribers. More funding poured in: $75 million from Sequoia and Sofina, followed by another $50 million in a funding round that included the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The money helped Byju’s expand its sales teams and establish studios that churned out ever more sophisticated content, created by a growing team of instructors. “They had a very, very aggressive sales model that was incentives-based,” Ranjan Goyal, an education technology consultant in Mumbai, told me. The sales team would be paid a commission for every new subscriber they brought in. “They had feet on the street who would go to people’s homes and convince them. … Many parents chose Byju’s, and Byju’s started growing rapidly.”

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan stands on stage before an audience of awestruck moms and dads in an ad that first aired in November 2017. “When people fall in love,” he tells them in Hindi, holding a heart-shaped balloon, “you can hear violins playing in the background.” But he isn’t the hero of this love story, he says, before segueing into a dance sequence that features the Pythagorean theorem. “Let our children fall in love – with learning,” he exhorts, to cheering applause. “Download Byju’s – the learning app.”

Byju’s was becoming one of the most visible startups in India. “They are masters at brand-building,” a top executive who left the company in 2023 told me. He noted how effectively the company used digital marketing methods, including search engine optimisation. “Even today, you look up random stuff [in education], Byju’s will come up as your first result.”

As investors lined up, Raveendran began to dream bigger. He wanted Byju’s to be a global edtech giant, and “it was like, ‘I’m on top of the world. You tell me what you want. I’ll get that done,’” S told me. Raveendran would say to his executives, S recalled, “This is how we create content. If you see someone else doing it better, we’ll buy them.”

Investors from around the world scrambled to get an audience with Raveendran, a former marketing executive said, remembering him traveling frequently to meet venture capitalists and fund managers from Hong Kong to London. Starting in July of 2017, the company began a string of acquisitions with TutorVista, an online company used mainly by students in the United States. By the end of 2018, Think and Learn was valued at over $1 billion. The big purchases continued: a digital game-based learning company, a digital reading platform for kids, a provider of online professional and higher education courses to learners in at least 170 countries.

Byju’s put significant investment into producing quality content, Apurva Mathur, a consultant for the company from 2020 until 2024, told me. Mathur helped develop videos on physics. “If we could think it, they would finance it,” he said. Five months into his job, he wanted to demonstrate that a steel bearing and a feather would take the same amount of time to fall to the ground in a perfect vacuum. “I casually said I wish I had a simulation of vacuum,” he recalled. “I said the word, and the simulation of vacuum was done and the video is there on the web.”

But the phenomenal expansion of the Byju’s corporate empire – which Mathur described as “an acquisition overdrive on steroids” – masked some troubling realities. Starting in 2018, under intense pressure to acquire new subscribers, the company’s sales teams were reportedly pressuring low-income families such as autorickshaw drivers, vegetable sellers, and construction workers. This was essential for continuing to increase the company’s subscriber base, and promoting the narrative of its ceaseless growth.

Former Byju’s employees revealed to Rest of World in 2021 that sales associates were instructed to ask children deliberately tricky questions during sales visits, to make them appear academically weak in front of their parents and pressure families into purchasing the company’s products. At the time, Byju’s told Rest of World it had “a stringent zero-tolerance policy towards any form of unprofessional dialogue or abuse” and that “in cases where such behavior comes to light, we immediately evaluate the situation and take corrective action.”

Jeevan Jena, the father of a teenage girl in Delhi, told me recently about such an experience. The sales staff had given him verbal assurances of all the support that Byju’s would provide to his daughter once she subscribed. “I asked them to give me everything in writing,” he told me. What they gave him in writing, however, didn’t include any of the verbal commitments. When he backed out of buying a subscription, he said, Byju’s staff in Bengaluru called him and threatened to take legal action. Jena wasn’t intimidated.

Even many of the low-income households who did want to sign up, meanwhile, couldn’t afford the fee required for a three-year subscription. So Byju’s came up with a workaround: The company helped aspiring subscribers secure loans from banks and other financial institutions, with Byju’s as the guarantor. The company offered refunds to those who weren’t satisfied with the progress their child was making during a 15-day trial period of the product.

“Of the 100 users who came in [a month], as many as 20 would ask for a refund,” S, the former senior executive, who had direct experience with sales, told me. In addition, he said, another 30% of subscribers would eventually stop paying the bank, which meant they were no longer bringing in revenue. But the refund process and the systems keeping track of subscribers’ monthly installments weren’t interlinked, S said, so it was hard to know how many paid subscribers there actually were. (Raveendran didn’t respond to questions about the company’s sales tactics or history of retaining and tracking subscriptions.)

Some of these problems were overshadowed by the sudden demand for online education when the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, kicking off a period of forced lockdowns and social distancing. A surge in cheap capital and rapid adoption of digital services fueled a tech investment bubble, with startups receiving high valuations despite unproven business models. Edtech was one of the sectors that reaped the biggest rewards, as demand for online education soared. Byju’s made its educational content accessible for free in the early weeks of the pandemic, which led to a huge volume of people downloading the app.

“The narrative was, ‘Okay, this is the company that is supporting people during this pandemic. They have a great digital product,’” a senior executive in the Byju’s ecosystem told me. There wasn’t enough scrutiny, he added, when Raveendran put out numbers about the business or its valuation. While the growth in subscribers and revenue in the first couple of years of the company’s existence had been real, he said, expecting that growth to continue at the same pace wasn’t realistic: “You cannot multiply everything in India by 1.4 billion [India’s population] and expect it to work.”

By the time Byju’s submitted its earnings report for the fiscal year ending 2021 to India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs – more than a year late – it was evident the business had not been profitable for some time. The company had lost a staggering amount of roughly $550 million in that time period – at least 15 times as much as it had lost the previous fiscal year. The company said at the time that the dip was due to deferring its revenue to subsequent years.

It’s unclear if investors didn’t receive timely information about these losses or if they didn’t care much since new investors were eager to jump on board. The senior executive in the Byju’s ecosystem saw the frenzy from up close. “I think investors really were hearing what they wanted to hear, because at that point, the valuation was going up every quarter,” he told me. “I literally saw that in board meetings. The new investor would come and ask a bunch of difficult questions. By the next quarter, there would be another investor at a higher valuation, and it was their problem now because [the earlier investors] had already marked up [their] investment 20%.”

In the absence of real growth in profits, the juggernaut became dependent on new rounds of fundraising, enabled by massive spending on brand-building. In 2019, Byju’s had purchased the rights to sponsor the jersey of the Indian cricket team, a contract that was extended until 2023. Then, in March 2022, Byju’s became an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar – a move aimed at getting global recognition for the brand. That same month, Byju’s announced it had raised a total of $800 million via a personal contribution from Raveendran and new funding from three investment companies, bringing the company to a reported valuation of $22 billion. One of them was an obscure entity named Sumeru Ventures.

There initially seemed nothing remarkable about Byju’s raising yet more capital. But three months after Sumeru’s investment, The Morning Context, a financial news website published from India, received an anonymous tip. Pradip Saha, a 40-year-old journalist at the publication who had been covering the company, told me the tip was vague – but suggested there was something fishy about Byju’s recent funding round.

Saha, who is short and stocky with a soothingly calm demeanor, began digging into Sumeru. The company’s website claimed it was a global technology fund, Saha recounted, but he could find only a handful of investments by the firm on the business information site Crunchbase, all into Indian startups. He looked through dozens of documents filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, which showed none of those companies had actually received money from the fund. Sumeru appeared to Saha to be a phantom: a name with no money attached, creating the impression of an investment that never came. Saha broke the story in The Morning Context in July 2022. He kept at the investigation for the next several months, eventually publishing the results in his 2023 book, The Learning Trap. (Sumeru Ventures could not be reached for comment.)

When I met Saha at a coffee shop in Delhi in January, he was still animated by the saga. “Byju’s had said the money from the fundraise had come, and the markets believed it,” he said. Riding in part on this supposed investment, “the company raised the next round of funding on a higher valuation.” The promised money from Sumeru never arrived. In his book, Saha recounts Raveendran defending himself by saying he’d heard from his investors that Sumeru would be a good backer. “I was like, I can’t believe you are [painting yourself as] the victim,” Saha told me. “If I can find out with a Google search that this company [Sumeru] has no history of investment, how can you not find it?” (Raveendran didn’t respond to a request for comment about Sumeru or his interactions with Saha.)

But it was the alleged fraud that led to the lawsuit in Delaware that would eventually draw the most scrutiny to Byju’s. In November 2021, the company had raised $1.2 billion in a “term loan B” from lenders in the United States. Such loans allow companies to focus on growth instead of making debt repayments until the end of the loan term, when a large repayment becomes due.

Byju’s defaulted on the loan. In March 2023, the lenders removed the leader of the company’s US subsidiary, Alpha Inc, and appointed a new director. In February 2024, Alpha filed for bankruptcy in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The US lenders made a shocking allegation that Byju’s had transferred about $533 million to a hedge fund called Camshaft Capital Fund. When the lenders investigated Camshaft’s background, they found it was run by William Morton, a man in his mid-20s with very little financial investment experience. Camshaft’s business address had once been listed as being inside an IHOP in Miami. (Camshaft’s lawyers told the Financial Times last year that the company “vigorously denies” the allegations against it. A lawyer for Camshaft did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)

Things were starting to unravel at home as well. On July 16, 2024, insolvency proceedings were initiated against Byju’s in India after the country’s National Company Law Tribunal admitted a lawsuit by the BCCI over unpaid dues from its sponsorship of the Indian cricket team. An attempted settlement of the suit between the two parties was quashed by India’s Supreme Court in October. The Byju’s empire was already in a tailspin at this point: Even though the companies under the Byju’s umbrella were still functioning, tens of thousands of employees were let go in successive rounds of layoffs. According to media reports, the company’s workforce went down from about 60,000 employees in 2022 to about 14,000 by early 2024.

In February, a month after my meetings with Raveendran, the judge in the Delaware court issued an opinion. It validated the allegation that Alpha Inc had fraudulently transferred funds from the $1.2 billion loan to Camshaft, essentially engaging in theft. “[The plaintiffs’] investigator concluded that the hedge fund was a sham, and I agree,” Judge John T Dorsey observed in the opinion. The defendants have appealed, and the case is ongoing.

Then, in April, a lawsuit filed on behalf of the lenders in the same Delaware court accused Raveendran, Gokulnath, and another key executive at Byju’s of stealing and hiding the missing $533 million.

Raveendran didn’t reply to a request for comment about the April lawsuit and Judge Dorsey’s opinion.

The unraveling of the Byju’s empire has come as a shock to many employees. One former employee who led a team for several years until 2024 told me he was proud of the work he and his colleagues had been doing. “I’ve never seen a team that was more dedicated to making sure that teaching was done right,” he said. He’d been surprised, he added, when he first heard the company needed to downsize because some expected investments hadn’t materialised. “Why do we need new investors for us to keep our businesses running?” he remembered wondering. “Have we just been burning investor money to keep up?”

S, meanwhile, lamented that he’d used the best years of his life to help build Byju’s, only to see it come apart. “A lot of us couldn’t believe it was happening,” he told me. “Like, okay, this can’t happen. It can’t be this bad. Till the end.”

In a podcast interview last year, Arjun Mohan, who was CEO for the company’s international and India divisions between July 2023 and April 2024, reflected on what he saw as its biggest flaw. “There was absolutely no control on cost,” he said. “Investments were done without any understanding of what could be the potential revenue, what could be the potential cash flow. A lot of things were always done in optimism and exuberance rather than deep business insights and research.”

Some investors, however, have managed to win big in the Byju’s saga. Several of the company’s early backers divested or sold off a significant part of their stake when the company was still riding high – such as Sequoia India (now Peak XV Partners), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Aarin Capital. Others, like Prosus, which ended up writing off its stake in Byju’s at a $493 million loss, were left holding the bag.

Anand Lunia, a founding partner in the VC firm India Quotient, told me the Byju’s debacle follows a familiar storyline in the tech industry: A startup gathers too much momentum too quickly – all on the promise of future growth, regardless of the fundamentals of the business – only to eventually come crashing down. “This is an indictment of the Silicon Valley money-pumping system,” Lunia said, likening the collapse of Byju’s to that of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now in prison. “You are in a rush to deploy money, and you deploy money without any firsthand diligence. Somebody praises Byju’s, and so you think, oh, yeah, we should invest in Byju’s.” In Lunia’s view, investors can’t be absolved of the blame.

Raveendran himself, though, has remained defiant. When we spoke in Dubai in January, the Delaware decision still hadn’t landed. He seemed to think the case would resolve in his favour. He attempted multiple times to convince me the accusation by the US lenders – that he had, in effect, siphoned $533 million from the $1.2 billion loan – was baseless. The money, he claimed, was routed through Camshaft to a UK-based intermediary so it could eventually finance new acquisition and expansion plans that Byju’s was in the process of implementing.

When I asked why Camshaft – which had no experience managing funds – had been chosen for this task, Raveendran said he’d merely gone along with a recommendation made by his bankers. “I didn’t know Camshaft,” he said, adding that he’d only learned who William Morton was after reading press reports.

This echoed how Pradip Saha of The Morning Context had recalled Raveendran defending himself about the investment from Sumeru Ventures. Raveendran promised to send me documents to support his argument, but he never did.

Sitting in the Dubai restaurant, Raveendran didn’t show any signs of impatience about my repeated questions about the alleged fraud, but I could tell he was dismayed at not being able to persuade me to accept his narrative. We sipped our coffee in silence for a couple of minutes as he gathered his thoughts.

Then he turned his attention to the future. Given the Delaware court proceedings and other ongoing cases, the possibility that Raveendran would regain control of Byju’s seemed remote. He projected optimism, nonetheless. And if he couldn’t recapture Byju’s, he vowed, he would simply build a new empire. He hinted again that he might launch an entirely new online platform, reiterating what he’d told me in an earlier conversation: “The moment I start teaching, I’m sure I will fill stadiums again.” Only this time, they would be virtual stadiums, infinitely large. “We have done trials,” he claimed. “What was [once] attended by 25,000 – a million students will attend.”

Since my time with him in Dubai, Raveendran has continued telling audiences his version of his company’s demise. In May, during a podcast interview about the fate of Byju’s, he used the word “narrative” 20 times – and vowed that his would prevail. He pushed back against the Delaware court opinion and allegations of theft, saying he’d been subject to “a very dirty game” by US investors. He said he felt for his former employees and apologised to paying students whose service was disrupted. His main mistakes, though, had only been “growing a little too soon too fast” – and taking the US loan, which he said the company hadn’t really needed anyway. His mansion in Dubai was rented, he claimed, adding that he’d put his own funds into paying salaries and trying to save the company. “I never started this for money,” he said, insisting he has no regrets. “What were the odds of me doing even a fraction of what I did?”

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.