Connect with us

Published

on

Signage at a Byju’s Tuition Center, operated by Think & Learn Pvt., in Mumbai, India, on Friday, Feb. 2, 2024. A unit of Byju’s, once one of India’s hottest tech startups, was put into bankruptcy in the US by a court-appointed agent who took over the shell company after it defaulted on $1.2 billion in debt. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Byju’s, once India’s most valuable startup, has seen a sharp reversal in its fortunes after a series of setbacks, including alleged accounting irregularities and purported mismanagement.

Valued at $22 billion in 2022, the Indian edtech startup’s valuation has since plummeted 95% after investors cut their stakes in multiple rounds. It was most recently slashed to $1 billion, after BlackRock downsized its holdings in Byju’s last month, according to media reports.

The company, which offers services ranging from online tutorials to offline coaching, attracted billions of dollars from investors across the world during the Covid-19 pandemic when online education services were on high demand.

Last Friday, major Byju’s shareholders, including Netherlands-based global investment group Prosus, voted to oust founder Byju Raveendran as chief executive officer.

Investors who attended an extraordinary general meeting “unanimously passed all resolutions put forward for vote,” which also sought to change the board, according to a statement Prosus sent CNBC.

“These included a request for the resolution of the outstanding governance, financial mismanagement and compliance issues at Byju’s; the reconstitution of the Board of Directors, so that it is no longer controlled by the founders of [Think & Learn Private Limited]; and a change in leadership of the company,” said the statement issued last Friday.

However, Byju’s rejected the resolutions, saying the extraordinary general meeting was “invalid and ineffective” due to a low turnout attended only by a “small cohort of select shareholders.”

“The passing of the unenforceable resolutions challenges the rule of law at worst,” the Bengaluru-headquartered firm said in a statement to CNBC.

“Byju’s emphasizes that the Honorable Karnataka High Court had granted interim relief, clearly stating that any decisions made during the meeting would not be given effect until the next hearing,” it said.

“As the founders did not participate in the meeting, the quorum was never legitimately established, rendering the resolutions null and void.”

History of Byju’s

In 2011, Raveendran — a teacher and engineer — founded Think and Learn Private Limited, the parent company of Byju’s. Raveendran was born into a family of teachers in Azhikode, a small village in southern India.

The company claimed that the launch of its flagship product, Byju’s — The Learning App, saw two million downloads within three months of its rollout in 2015. The app offers interactive videos, games and quizzes to help students with everyday classes as well as exam preparation.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought exponential growth to Byju’s when traditional classrooms shuttered, leading to skyrocketing demand for online learning.

In November, Byju’s co-founder Divya Gokulnath told CNBC the company had more than 100 million monthly students on its platform.

Byju’s growth attracted global investors and significant funding rounds including a $1.2 billion in debt financing in November 2021, according to company database service Crunchbase.

Byju's co-founder on the Indian tech startup's turnaround plan

Flush with funds, Byju’s went on an acquisition spree between 2017 and 2021.

Some of Byju’s biggest acquisitions include Aakash Educational Services, a leading test-prep company in India, which it reportedly paid about $950 million for in 2021.

Other strategic acquisitions include U.S-based kids’ digital reading platform Epic ($500 million), educational games maker Osmo ($120 million) and online coding school WhiteHat Jr.

“2022 would be the year of maximum acquisitions, nine big ones. So the pandemic was great, because it solved the biggest challenge of people not knowing about how online education can be a part of mainstream learning,” Gokulnath told CNBC in November last year.

“But the disadvantage was also that we had to grow at a frenetic pace. We had to grow to ensure that we were able to meet the demand,” she added.

So what went wrong?

The end of pandemic restrictions saw a slowdown in online learning and Byju’s had to let go of at least 1,000 employees in June last year, according to tech jobs tracker layoffs.fyi.

In the same month, the company’s auditor Deloitte and three of its prominent board members severed ties with Byju’s, as questions loomed around the company’s financial health and governance practices, according to a Reuters report.

Byju’s filed its financials for 2022 in November last year, after a year-long delay due to governance issues and its auditor’s resignation. Operating losses came to 24 billion Indian rupees (about $290 million) for its core online education business.

Byju's $300mn acquisition of coding startup WhiteHat Jr. is a 'no-brainer': Byju's CEO

“One thing that we should have focused on earlier is governance,” Gokulnath told CNBC in the November interview. “That’s something that we’re constantly building on to the next one year. I’m hopeful that we’re also able to stand on the governance side.”

Byju’s has reportedly struggled to repay a $1.2 billion loan and is said to be struggling with staff salaries as well. The firm said in January it is raising a $200 million rights issue of shares to clear “immediate liabilities” and for other operational costs.

The company’s U.S. unit Alpha filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in a Delaware court on Feb. 1.

Byju’s did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

On whether Byju’s has lost the confidence of shareholders, Gokulnath said in November: “We would like to believe that we have not, because at all time, we’ve kept the interest of our students, parents, employees and shareholders in mind and what we are doing, we are doing to build this back together.”

Continue Reading

Technology

Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Published

on

By

Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

Read more CNBC politics coverage

X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

Continue Reading

Technology

Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Published

on

By

Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

Read more CNBC tech news

“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

Former OpenAI exec says tariffs 'present AI's moment to shine'

Continue Reading

Technology

Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

Published

on

By

Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Tesla’s decade-long journey to robotaxis

Tesla's decade-long journey to robotaxis

Continue Reading

Trending