Byju Raveendran To Become India's First Education Based Unicorn!

At a time when most consumer internet firms are battling a cash crunch, Byju’s is aiming to be India’s next homegrown unicorn

- Sayan Chakraborty

Byju Raveendran spent the winter of 2005 musing over the promises and perils of entrepreneurship. It was a stable, comfortable time for him. His job as a service engineer at Pan Ocean Shipping was taking him to distant corners of the world, from the Caribbean islands to Spain and, more importantly, bringing home close to ₹50 lakh a year, no mean sum for a middle-class household in Azhikode, a coastal village in the Kannur district of Kerala.

But events had compelled him to ponder the possibilities of a riskier career.

Around August that year, while on a break to meet friends and family in Bengaluru after a 15-month-long voyage, Raveendran—born to school teachers—spent most weekends giving math tuitions to his friends aspiring to crack management entrance tests. He found that, over the next three months, new faces started getting added to his ‘class’. Raveendran went viral on employee forums at technology companies, and chatter around his ability to water down complex mathematical problems to suit anybody’s appetite started getting louder.

That year, Raveendran took the Common Aptitude Test (CAT) “for fun”, scored in the 100th percentile and cleared interviews for the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata.

He found himself spoilt for choice. “I could have gone back to the job because I was in love with it. I could join an IIM. I could also scale up the tutorials. They [his students] were giving me so much more importance than what I had ever got,” recalls Raveendran, 38, sitting in the conference room of his eponymous company’s headquarters in Bengaluru.