Part 9 of 15 in The Byju's Files← Part 8Part 10 →
📚 This is part of The Byju’s Files — my full, ordered collection on how India’s biggest edtech company rose and fell, and what parents and founders should learn from it.
Lakshmi vs Saraswati
Edutech can be a force for good – or for evil !
Today’s well-funded startups like Byju’s which target school students have focussed on maximising profits, by providing a digital alternative to tuition classes and boring classroom teachers, rather than focus on inspiring a desire to learn in students .
Khan Academy and online MOOCs were originally started with the aim of making high quality educational resources freely available to all.
What a farce this has become – where everything we do is tainted by the desire to make money !
We are selling out our next generation in the pursuit of short-term profits.
Update — 2026. When I first wrote this, Byju's was India's most valuable startup, worth around $22 billion. It has since collapsed. Its investors wrote the value down to near zero, its auditor and independent directors resigned, it defaulted on a $1.2 billion loan, and it was pulled into insolvency proceedings. Thousands of the young people it hired were let go. I take no pleasure in having been right — the human cost was real. I've gathered the whole story, in order, in The Byju's Files.
Khan academy is still a free educational platform. Many moocs are now charging because of the fact that there’s a unimaginable positive response which they were initially not expecting. Now as they started teaching courses which are required by industry and are done by industry professionals so they charge fee. Regarding school education which I feel is a birth right and should be free for all these moocs like unacademy, byju’s,vedantu etc are merely a another version of coaching industry so I don’t dont consider them benefiting all individuals.
In India its a race to live so definitely they are also in the race so making money.