Red flags in Byju’s still-incomplete Aakash acquisition

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Editor's note: When news broke in January 2021 that Byju’s, India’s most valuable unicorn, which was then valued at $12 billion, was in talks to buy Aakash Educational Services Ltd for $1 billion, it took edtech industry watchers by surprise.   The deal, one of the world’s biggest edtech acquisitions, was announced three months later. It was a move that came out of left field. A pioneer of online education in India going after the champions of offline coaching. It started a trend. Today, every online education company either has or is planning to have an offline presence, but I digress. Two years after the deal was first announced, the AESL merger is still not complete. And now, The Morning Context has learnt that Think & Learn Pvt. Ltd (the Byju’s parent entity) doesn’t own AESL entirely. As things stand, a big chunk of the company is owned by founder and CEO Byju Raveendran through one of his private firms registered in Singapore. “The final payment for the acquisition did not go from Think & Learn because the company did not have enough …