Byju Raveendran was born in 1980 to a Malayaly family at Azhikode, a coastal village in Kerala and grew up in a joint family. Byju Raveendran started his studies at a local Malayalam Medium School of Azhikode, Kerala where both his parents were teachers. He obtained a mechanical engineering degree from a Government Engineering College in Kannur of Calicut University. After completed his engineering studies, Byju received a job in a multi-national shipping firm as a service engineer who started traveling all around the world.
In 2003, during his two months break from an overseas job as a service engineer, Byju decided to help some of his friends appearing for CAT in Bangalore. It was an informal way of helping, and he also took the exam, and scored 100 percentile. He started teaching some of his friends, and took up the test yet again in 2005 without any preparation, and scored a perfect 100 percentile yet again. This time he also appeared for IIM-A, B, C interviews and cleared all of them. However, decided against pursuing MBA and instead saw potential in teaching students how to crack CAT. So, all in all, it was just by chance, that he took the entrepreneurial path, but teaching was a choice he made. Slowly and steadily, it was through word of mouth that the number of students grew. It can be called a slightly different kind of offline teaching as he would teach over 1000 students in an auditorium back in 2007.
They grew from Bangalore to 9 cities. He travelled to 9 cities in a week to teach and that continued till 2009. Hopping between 9 cities, Byju soon started using video format for CAT and similar entrance exams. But, it was in 2011 that he formed the company, dubbed Byju’s, with the help of some of his students who had graduated from IIMs. It was in 2011 that they started creating core learning products, which are today a part of the app-based format. It took 4 years to create this learning mobile application. He launched BYJU’s – The Learning App, his flagship product In 2015 for school students which would help students gain access to the educational material that Byju has to offer. The learning app also coaches for CAT, the National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET), the civil services examination, the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).
