The co-founder of upskilling business Great Learning that e-learning platform Byju's had acquired in 2021 has bought back the Indian unit of the sold company for a fraction of the $600 million that it was sold for, according to an executive with knowledge of the transaction, an account that is backed by documents filed with India's registrar of companies (RoC).
As millionaire businessman Byju Raveendran and Think & Learn Pvt. Ltd, or TLPL, the flagship company in his edtech empire once courted by top venture funders and private credit companies of the world, battle creditors in insolvency proceedings, it has emerged that Mohan Krishna Lakhamraju struck a cash deal early in 2024 to buy back full control of Great Learning Education Services Pvt. Ltd, a business formerly owned by him and co-founders, one which still turns in revenues of nearly ₹500 crore a year in India.
The executive, who insisted on staying off the record, said $10 million was the value at which the Indian unit was bought back. Mint could not confirm this independently.
Mint has also learnt Lakhamraju is negotiating with TLPL's term loan lenders, who are rapidly moving to assert control over the assets linked to Byju’s overseas entities to whom they lent money with group company shares as collateral, to acquire Singapore-registered Great Learning Education Pte. Ltd. The lenders are seeking an enterprise value of around $150-200 million for the Singapore unit, said the executive quoted without name earlier.
Enterprise value, often referred to as the total value of a business, adds up the value of the shares and debt net of cash and cash equivalents on its books.
RoC filings show that shareholders of Great Learning Education Services Pvt. Ltd, the Indian company now controlled by Lakhamraju, approved a spending of up to ₹300 crore in related party transactions involving Singapore companies Great Learning Education Pte. Ltd, Northwest Education Pte. Ltd and Northwest Executive Education Pte. Ltd besides Chennai management school Great Lakes Institute of Management. The b-school and Great Learning companies are not related by shareholding, per RoC documents, but Lakhamraju chairs the former.
The executive cited above estimated that the Singapore business of Great Learning make 50% more than the Indian unit's revenues but this also could not be corroborated by Mint from compliance documents.
Founded in 2013, Great Learning sells online programmes for working professionals across areas such as data science and business analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing, cybersecurity and software development, among others. It runs a large part of its portfolio through academic tie-ups, including programmes offered with Great Lakes, Vellore-headquartered SRM Institute, and overseas partners such as Texas Executive Education at University of Texas at Austin.
Byju’s acquisition of the Great Learning global franchise in July 2021 gave it an entry into the executive education and professional upskilling segment—an adjacent and higher-ticket category compared with its core K-12 test-prep and learning products.
Lakhamraju, Great Learning, TLPL, and GLAS Trust, the administrative and collateral agent representing lenders had not responded to requests for comments until publishing.
Compliance documentation reveals much
A key reason the Great Learning buyback talks gathered pace, one of the people cited earlier said, was that the $600‑million acquisition announced in 2021 was not paid in full.
The other trigger was lenders stepping up enforcement over Byju’s offshore collateral: in October 2023, financial and risk advisory firm Kroll Pte. Ltd was appointed receiver to take control of Great Learning Education Pte. Ltd. With the India business back in his control, Lakhamraju is now engaged with the lenders on a settlement for the Singapore unit.
Filings with India's RoC show Byju Raveendran ceased to be a director of the Indian business Great Learning Education Services Pvt. Ltd as of 30 April 2024. His brother and TLPL co-promoter Riju Ravindran is also not named as a director on the same date.
Great Learning Education Services Pvt. Ltd had three board members before; the third being Lakhamraju.
The same annual return shows that, as of 31 March 2025, Great Learning Education Services Pvt. Ltd had two directors: Lakhamraju, also the company’s chief executive, and Hari Krishnan Nair, another co‑founder.
Byju's and Riju's exit from Great Learning Services Pvt. Ltd’s board came after GLAS Trust Company LLC—the administrative and collateral agent for TLPL's $1.2‑billion term‑loan lenders—moved the Bengaluru bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) seeking to initiate insolvency proceedings against the parent of the Byju’s business. The lenders said they approached the tribunal after months of failed restructuring talks and alleged defaults under the term loan.
The beginning of the deal
The Great Learning business was wholly acquired by TLPL for $600 million in a cash, stock and earnout deal in July 2021. Both parties said at the time that Great Learning would continue to operate as an independent unit within the Byju's group under Lakhamraju, along with Hari Krishnan Nair and a third co-founder Arjun Nair.
The Great Learning deal came during Byju’s aggressive acquisition spree in 2021, after the edtech firm raised capital from investors including UBS Group, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund ADQ, and Blackstone. Earlier that year, Byju’s had signed its biggest India deal: acquiring test-prep business Aakash Educational Services Ltd, or AESL, for close to $1 billion and later bought US reading platform Epic in a $500 million cash-and-stock deal.
The strategic intent was a leap of faith even by the white-hot ambitions seen in the digital ecosystem: build a full-stack ed-tech platform to service large swathes of demand worldwide.
But, as revenues failed to keep pace with ambition, the dreams unravelled and several of Byju's overseas assets became focal points in lender litigation. Its term-loan lenders alleged that the control of Epic was moved away from the borrower group through a series of steps involving offshore entities. Those claims are being contested in US courts.
In India, AESL is now controlled by the Manipal group’s Ranjan Pai, which raised its holding to more than 58% over the past year by buying out founder J.C. Chaudhry and private equity investor Blackstone.
After the July 2021 takeover by Byju's, Great Learning bought Northwest Executive Education, an executive education provider that partners with universities and business schools to deliver short-format and certificate-style programmes for working professionals in Singapore and other markets, in May 2022 in a cash-and-stock deal that media reports then pegged at about $100 million. Northwest was founded by Mohit Jain and Tamhant Jain, both Harvard Business School alumni, per their LinkedIn profiles.
The road ahead leads to Singapore
RoC filings show Great Learning Education Services Pvt. Ltd remains plugged into an offshore holding structure: its annual return for fiscal 2025 lists Singapore-based Powerahead Pte Ltd as its holding company with 100% shareholding.
The Indian company’s last annual general meeting (AGM) was held on 25 September 2025 when shareholders adopted the audited standalone and consolidated financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2025.
At the same meeting, as stated earlier, shareholders approved related-party transactions for fiscal 2026, setting an aggregate cap of ₹300 crore. The filing of the AGM breaks the ₹300 crore ceiling into sub-limits: up to ₹200 crore with Great Learning Education Pte. Ltd, up to ₹40 crore with the two Northwest entities, and up to ₹60 crore with Great Lakes Institute of Management. These transactions “covered payments/receipts for business support (including manpower support and allied services and for investing in technology),” according to the filing. [Great Lakes was founded by the late Bala V. Balachandran, formerly a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in Illinois, United States. He passed away in Chicago in September 2021.]
The Indian company Great Learning Education Services Pvt. Ltd's revenue rose to ₹470.8 crore in fiscal 2025 from ₹456.4 crore a year earlier, while total expenses fell to ₹499.7 crore from ₹515.2 crore, according to its consolidated financials stated with the RoC. Total debt remained flat at ₹188 crore in both the years and net loss narrowed sharply to ₹2.2 crore in fiscal 2025 from ₹58 crore in fiscal 2024.
A legal expert Mint reached out to explained the possible ways in which Lakhamraju and co-founders could have acquired Great Learning back from Byju's. In a standard Indian share purchase agreement (SPA), said Archana Balasubramanian, partner at Agama Law Associates, payment and share transfer happen together. Nothing, however, stops the parties from transferring shareholding on deferred consideration.
But, if the buyer defaults on a deferred payout, robust SPAs will typically carry a “wind-back” clause that spells out what happens if the money does not arrive. In an unlisted Indian company, the basic requirements on the seller side are board approval and a shareholder resolution for the share transfer back.
"Given the discounting in valuation of Byju and its subsidiaries as a whole, it would have become easier and more economonical for the ex-founder and current CEO to buy out the shares," Balasubramanian told Mint.