The founder of Indian edtech company Byju’s, which was shut down recently, was sentenced to six months of imprisonment by a Singapore court for contempt, sources told the media.
The court handed out a jail term to Byju Raveendran as it found him in contempt of its orders issued on his assets, since April 2024.
Following the instructions issued by the court, Raveendran will have to report to the authorities and pay the court fees, which total $70,500, together with documents that would prove that the shares of Beeaar Investco Pte belong to him legally.
This impending jail term marks a devastating low point for the entrepreneur, who is currently swamped by aggressive legal battles launched by foreign investors globally. This includes a high-stakes corporate brawl in the United States, where international lenders are aggressively trying to claw back massive losses tied to a soured $1.2 billion loan. Raveendran did not immediately offer a comment on the sentencing, and his current whereabouts remain unknown, making it unclear whether he is presently in Singapore or overseas.
Raveendran initially shot to global prominence after launching Think & Learn Pvt — the parent company behind the Byju’s brand — a venture that rapidly turned him into a billionaire and celebrated poster child for India’s booming start-up ecosystem. His meteoric rise made the company a magnet for capital from top-tier international investment firms.
However, this specific legal crisis in Singapore stems from a lawsuit brought by a subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority, the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund that backed the tech company even as it was unravelling and implementing mass redundancies. In these court proceedings, Qatar Holdings was represented by the legal firm Drew & Napier, whilst Fervent Chambers appeared on behalf of Byju’s Investments.
