Byju Raveendran - A New Entrant In This Year's Rich List

Byju’s has aced the online education market like no one else, making its CEO Byju Raveendran a new entrant in this year’s Rich List

- Sayan Chakraborty

On a nippy winter morning in 2012, the lobby of Manipal’s Valley View hotel looked unusually busy. The visitors seemed like students, armed with satchels and notebooks. Some engaged in animated conversations. Others, with all the gravity befitting an earnest student, pored over their notebooks. Ranjan Pai was intrigued.

The chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group learned from the hotel manager that some coaching class for management entrance tests was being held. That, this has been going on for a couple of years. That, about 800 students have been attending those sessions. That strikingly big number was enough for an astute businessman like Pai to sit up and take note. He went about looking for the person at the helm of the drive.

Pai vividly recalls minute details of his first meeting with Byju Raveendran that day. “He was humble but extremely confident,” says Pai.

That morning, over coffee, Raveendran sold Pai a story. A story of how a small-town boy from Azhikode, a coastal village in the Kannur district of Kerala, aced maths as a subject, kept acing the much-vaunted Common Entrance Test (CAT) as a hobby, and how his pedagogy became so popular in a few years that he was constrained to book halls and auditoriums to make space for his ever-expanding student base. Also, he ran a profitable show with an annual turnover of ₹4-5 crore.

The braggadocio apart, Pai had spotted a potential gold mine. By the end of the day, he made an offer to invest in the venture, only if Raveendran could figure out a way to move his business completely online.

In about two weeks, Raveendran came back with a plan, and a proposal for Pai to invest ₹50 crore into his company. “I literally fell off the chair,” he recalls. “I was expecting him to ask for about ₹10-12 crore. He was also expecting a high valuation. I told him the ask was too high for a company of his size.”