India’s most valuable statup Byju’s hired investment banks to raise a minimum of $500 million through Term Loan B (TLB) Borrowings but succeeded in raising a total of $1.2 billion.
The edtech unicorn had started working with the leading global investment bank and wealth management firm Morgan Staley. Byju’s has spent billions of dollars this year on acquisition so maybe wanted to refill it with debt bit due to the investors appetite, the funds raised by a huge margin.
TLB in means refers to a tranche of senior secured syndicated credit facility from global institutional investors. In July Oyo raised TLB of about $660 million to refinance existing debts and became the first company to raise it. And now, Byju’s becomes the second firm to raise a TLB in India. In TLB a large part of the principal amount and interests are to be paid on maturity which makes them very attractive sources for fast-growing startups.
The company will use these funds for general corporate functions, acquisitions and many more. The company is accelerating for an initial public offering.
Byju’s has spent more than $2 billion in acquisitions of various firms in the last six months, but it has not reached its destination until now and has plans for more acquisitions.
Byju Raveendran, founder and chief executive officer of Byju’s disclosed in July that the company was making a 12-18 months plan for an IPO. It acquired upskilling platform Great learning for $600 million and is going to invest $400 million more to expand its services all over the globe. In this year, the company also acquired educational ganes makes Osmo, US-based reading platform Epic, coding start-up WhiteHat Jr and Aakash Educational Services Limited which is a test preparation firm. Along with this, the company has also announced a fundraiser of $350 million from Blackstone, UBS, Phoenix Rising, ADQ and Zoom founder Eric Yuan in June.
The company is now valued at $16.5 billion and in the last 18 months it has raised over $1.5 billion which is a big achievement for the company. The main reason for the fast pace growth of the company is the promotion of online education during the coronavirus pandemic.
