in a surreal moment for the startup, once the most valuable in India.<\/span><\/p>\nAt an emergency general meeting that concluded earlier today, a group of investors including Prosus Ventures and Peak XV Partners voted to change the leadership at the startup. The participating shareholders \u2014 whose combined ownership in Byju\u2019s exceeded 60%, according to a source familiar with the matter \u2014 also passed the resolution to reconstitute Byju\u2019s board.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt today\u2019s Extraordinary General Meeting shareholders unanimously passed all resolutions put forward for vote. These included a request for the resolution of the outstanding governance, financial mismanagement and compliance issues at BYJU\u2019s; the reconstitution of the Board of Directors, so that it is no longer controlled by the founders of T&L; and a change in leadership of the Company,\u201d the shareholder group said in a statement, provided by Prosus, one of the largest investors at Byju\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs shareholders and significant investors, we are confident in our position on the validity of the EGM meeting and its decisive outcome, which we will now present to the Karnataka High Court in line with due process.\u201d<\/p>\n
The decision on Friday comes after more than a year of unrest among some of Byju\u2019s largest investors, who assert that the $22 billion Indian edtech startup has played fast and loose with accountability.<\/p>\n
In a statement on Friday, Byju\u2019s questioned the legitimacy of the resolutions passed in the EGM, saying only a \u201csmall cohort of select shareholders\u201d attended the meeting and termed their decisions \u201cinvalid and ineffective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Byju\u2019s, which has raised over $5 billion to date, spent more than $2.5 billion in 2021 and 2022 on acquisitions alone. The startup, founded a decade ago, sought to go public in early 2022 through a SPAC deal that would have valued the Bengaluru-headquartered firm at about $48 billion. But as the market turned, Byju\u2019s was forced to abandon its plan for the IPO.<\/p>\n
Byju\u2019s has been chasing new funding for more than a year. The startup was in the final stages to raise about $1 billion last year, but the talks derailed after the auditor Deloitte and three key board members (representatives of Prosus, Peak XV and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) abruptly quit the startup.<\/p>\n
Instead, Byju\u2019s ended up raising less than $150 million in debt from Davidson Kempner and had to repay the investor the full committed amount after making a technical default in a separate $1.2 billion term loan B.<\/p>\n
Late last month, Byju\u2019s launched a rights issue where it sought to raise about $200 million at a massively discounted rate. Raveendran told shareholders earlier this week that the rights issue had been fully subscribed and requested all existing investors to participate and maintain their ownership.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have built this company together and I want us all to participate in this renewed mission. Your initial investment laid the foundation for our journey and this rights issue will help preserve and build greater value for all shareholders,\u201d he wrote in the letter. \u201c[\u2026] I understand that participating in this rights issue may seem like a Hobson\u2019s choice. However, this is the only viable option in front of us today to prevent permanent value erosion.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of Byju\u2019s investors on Friday voted to remove the edtech group\u2019s founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran and separately filed an oppression and management suit against the leadership at the firm to block the recently launched rights issue in a surreal moment for the startup, once the most valuable in India. At an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-77870","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}