They were clearly overvalued by $24 billion.

I'm not sure I would take ownership if you gave me $2b. It would take more for me to bite.

Indian startups are copycats or fraudulent. This one was the latter. A lot of education is still required in the country before it can break free.

Not sure if this is a troll. But there are many examples that are neither. Blinkit, urban company, licious come to mind.

blinkit and licious are food delivery companies, or "copy cats" serving unserved markets.

Don't agree. Blinkit sells almost everything. Haven't found another service similar to it. Same for licious, it's definitely not a "food delivery company". They have a very specific focus, one that is not very common. I am not even sure about the "unserved market" assertion. These guys literally created a market where nobody thought one existed.

To the surprise of absolutely no one

More than half a billion USD in revenue but can't break even with a digital-only product. Amazing.

What could they possibly be spending that money on?

Usually in cases like this revenue is fake, moving same or non existing $ around between multiple entities controlled by same party.

Terrible for the country’s reputation as a startup hub.

I feel that Byju's focused on the wrong part of the chain. They identified a real problem: the education system in India is inadequate in many way at many levels. Byju's bypassed all the official channels and positioned their products as add-ons.

You had to attend school, do all the assignments as usual, and also complete Byju's course work in parallel. Same if you wanted to prepare for MBA and were in college. Your college was still going on and 100% necessary. Byju's is just an additional burden.

Instead Byju's should have started a chain of primary and secondary/higher-secondary schools. These schools would have included any additional prep that normal schools omit. This way students would be able to focus on one thing, without any conflicting situations. And it would be much more efficient.

And if Byju's were able to make that work, it would have been a massive disruption in the country's education system. But we just got costly stupid tuition classes.