Byju's American assets Epic and Tynker sold for a song
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Two American assets of troubled edtech company Byju's, coding platform Tynker and kids learning platform Epic , have been sold for a fraction of what the company paid for them.A US bankruptcy court approved both the sales during a hearing on May 20, as per a report by EdWeek Market Brief.Computer science education company CodeHS has acquired Tynker for $2.2 million in cash, a significant drop from the $200 million that Byju's paid in a cash-and-stock deal to acquire it in 2021.Epic, which was acquired by Byju's in 2022 through a $500-million cash-and-stock transaction, has been sold to China's TAL Education Group for $95 million.Queries sent to Byju's are yet to elicit a response.Epic was Byju's second-biggest buyout after coaching centre operator Aakash Institute, which it acquired in 2021 for nearly $1 billion.In June 2024, ET had reported that some lenders within a consortium that loaned $1.2 billion to Byju's had said that they had filed a petition in a US court to initiate bankruptcy proceedings against the company's subsidiaries Epic, Tynker and Osmo.On April 10, the lenders filed a lawsuit in the US against Raveendran, his wife Divya Gokulnath and former company executive Anita Kishore. The lawsuit alleged that the three of them planned and executed a scheme to hide and misappropriate $533 million from the money they had lent to Byju's Alpha, a special purpose financing vehicle the edtech company had established in the US to receive the loan.Prior to this, a Delaware Bankruptcy Court ruling indicated that multiple fraudulent transfers and theft had taken place. According to the lenders, the court also found that suspended director Riju Ravindran had violated his fiduciary responsibilities as a director of the US entity, Byju's Alpha Inc.In India, both the brothers have moved the NCLT and NCLAT seeking a stay on the committee of creditors (CoC) and the removal of the resolution professional. This move comes after the resolution professional for Think & Learn began steps to withdraw certain legal proceedings in a New York court. Separately, concerns have also been raised over the ongoing sale of the company's assets.Think & Learn, represented by the RP, has also alleged that its shareholding in Aakash is getting diluted after the coaching centre operator amended its articles of association (AoA) to remove the reserved rights of minority investors by enforcing the resolutions passed at an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) last November.
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