AUTHOR: Sakshi Poojary, BMS college of law
Introduction: What Is the “Unicorn Problem”?
Between 2015 and 2023, India produced over a hundred unicorns — startups worth $1 billion or more — in fintech, edtech, mobility, and e-commerce. Their pitch decks told a simple story: fast growth, a visionary founder, a market too big to fail. What the pitch decks left out was the legal machinery holding that story together — what kind of shares investors actually got, what conditions came attached to big loans, how many board seats were traded away for money, and which country’s courts would end up deciding any dispute.
That gap is the “unicorn problem.” Indian company law, securities rules, and foreign exchange control were built for a slower kind of company — one board meeting, one balance sheet, one country at a time. A startup can now go from its first funding round to a billion-dollar valuation, and from a single Indian company to a group spread across three countries, in under five years. Every stage of that speed run creates a new legal risk: in how the money comes in, how it gets spent, who ends up controlling the company, and which regulator or court gets to ask questions when it all goes wrong.
The last few years have given India more real examples of this than the previous decade combined. Gensol Engineering and its sister company BluSmart Mobility collapsed after SEBI, India’s stock market regulator, found that loan money meant for buying electric vehicles had quietly been moved to related companies instead. BharatPe’s co-founder Ashneer Grover was pushed out after an independent review found company money being used for personal expenses and deals with people connected to him. GoMechanic’s own founders admitted, in writing, to inflating their revenue numbers to attract investors. And Byju’s, once India’s most valuable startup, fell apart through a chain of auditor resignations, board exits, an insolvency case, and a US$1 billion judgment against its founder in a US bankruptcy court. That founder, Byju Raveendran, is also fighting a foreign exchange law notice worth over ₹9,362 crore and a jail sentence for contempt of court from a Singapore judge.
Thesis: none of these companies failed because they raised too much money. They failed because the legal side of the business — how it was governed, what it disclosed, who controlled it — never grew as fast as the money did. This article follows that failure through four stages: raising money, spending it, controlling the company, and dealing with more than one country at once. The argument is simple: legal maturity, not valuation, is what actually makes a company built to last.
1. Fundraising Beyond the Pitch Deck
1.1 Equity, CCPS, and Convertible Instruments
Indian startups almost never raise their early money through plain equity shares. The usual tool is the Compulsorily Convertible Preference Share (“CCPS”) — a hybrid security, under Section 43 of the Companies Act, 2013, that sits between a preference share and an equity share. CCPS are issued at an agreed price and must convert into ordinary equity later, usually when the company raises its next round. They are popular for a practical reason: India’s foreign exchange rules (FEMA) are much stricter about money that looks like a loan than money that looks like capital. So CCPS is close to the only clean way for a startup to take foreign investment without running into External Commercial Borrowing rules — the stricter set of conditions that apply to foreign loans.
1.2 ASAs and SAFE-Like Structures
Global investors like the Simple Agreement for Future Equity (“SAFE”), a tool invented by the US accelerator Y Combinator that puts off fixing a valuation until the next funding round, in exchange for cash today. A SAFE is neither debt nor equity — and that is exactly why it does not work in India, where every instrument has to be clearly one or the other for tax, company law, and FEMA purposes. So Indian investors rebuilt the same idea using CCPS instead: 100X.VC’s “iSAFE” note, launched in 2019, is legally just a promise to allot CCPS later, with a token dividend added only because the law requires preference shares to carry one. In short, the SAFE survives in India only because it is dressed up as something Indian company law already recognises.
1.3 Valuation, Down Rounds, and Anti-Dilution
Every priced funding round fixes a conversion price for existing CCPS holders. When a later round prices the company lower than an earlier one — a “down round” — a clause called anti-dilution decides who absorbs the loss. A “full ratchet” clause resets the earlier investor’s price to match the new, lower one, no matter how small the new round is. It is harsh on founders and now rare in Indian deals. The Indian standard is “broad-based weighted average” anti-dilution, which adjusts the price based on how big the down round actually is, spreading the loss between founders and the new investor instead of putting it all on founders.
This is not just theory. Byju’s was valued at $22 billion in October 2022. Within eighteen months, BlackRock had marked its own stake down to imply a company value of about $1 billion, and Prosus — which held close to 10% of the company — wrote its entire stake to zero. A 2024 rights issue then raised $200 million at a valuation of roughly $225 million — a fall of over 99% from the peak. That is the scale of loss an anti-dilution clause has to divide up, and which formula a term sheet used decided exactly how founders, employees holding stock options, and later investors each absorbed the fall.
Raising the money is only step one. What happens to it after it lands in the company’s bank account is where the next set of problems starts.
2. From Raising Money to Using Money
Two failure patterns show up again and again here: lying to get the money, and misusing it once it is in.
2.1 Pre-Funding Misrepresentation
Fundraising documents are, legally, a set of promises about revenue, customers, and technology that investors rely on before they hand over money. When those promises are knowingly false, the fundraise is not just an overly optimistic pitch — it is fraud. The clearest international example is the US SEC’s 2020 case against YouPlus Inc. and its founder, Shaukat Shamim. YouPlus raised about $17 million by claiming to have built an AI “video opinion search engine” with over 100 clients, including Fortune 500 names, and revenue in the millions. In reality, staff in India were manually watching videos and typing up notes — there was no AI — and the company had earned under $500,000 from four paying customers in its entire history. When an investor asked for proof, Shamim allegedly handed over forged bank statements. He was later convicted of securities fraud and sent to prison.
India has its own, more recent version of the same story. GoMechanic, a Sequoia and Tiger Global-backed car servicing startup, was close to a $75–80 million round led by SoftBank in 2022 when SoftBank’s due-diligence team found the company’s revenue and growth numbers did not add up. The deal collapsed, and in January 2023 co-founder Amit Bhasin admitted on LinkedIn that the founders had “made errors in judgement” while chasing growth. A forensic audit later found the company’s FY22 accounts had booked ₹23.98 crore of fictitious “market support income,” and that bank statements shown to one investor had been doctored to inflate the account balance by about ₹30 crore. GoMechanic’s investors — Peak XV Partners, Orios Venture Partners, and Chiratae Ventures — filed a police complaint, and the company’s founders were later named in a criminal case for fraud and cheating under the Indian Penal Code.
The pattern in both cases is the same: founder-supplied numbers, unaudited claims, and non-binding letters of intent were taken at face value in the early rounds, and the truth only came out when a bigger investor’s due diligence team looked closely, or when a whistleblower spoke up. Indian law does have tools to punish this after the fact — Section 447 of the Companies Act, 2013 makes fraud a crime, and SEBI’s rules catch fraudulent inducement for listed securities — but private fundraising mostly escapes scrutiny until it is too late.
2.2 Post-Funding Misuse of Capital
Gensol/BluSmart. SEBI’s interim order of 15 April 2025 is the sharpest recent example of money being diverted after it was raised. Gensol had borrowed ₹977.75 crore from two government-backed lenders, with ₹663.89 crore set aside to buy 6,400 electric vehicles that would then be leased to BluSmart Mobility — a company controlled by the same two brothers, Anmol Singh Jaggi and Puneet Singh Jaggi, who ran Gensol. SEBI found that a large share of this earmarked money never reached its stated purpose. Funds were routed through related companies — including one called Wellray — with roughly ₹424 crore allegedly ending up in personal accounts and expenses, in what SEBI called the promoters treating a listed company like “a personal piggy bank.” A site visit by the National Stock Exchange found no manufacturing activity at Gensol’s much-advertised EV plant, and the company’s claimed 30,000 vehicle pre-orders turned out to be a handful of non-binding memoranda of understanding. SEBI barred both brothers from the securities market and ordered a forensic audit; the Ministry of Corporate Affairs opened its own separate investigation. BluSmart, which depended on Gensol for its cars, suspended operations within days.
The lesson: the gap between raising money and spending it is where Indian startup governance is weakest. Term sheets spend pages negotiating valuation and who gets paid first if the company is sold, but they rarely include a binding, checkable promise about what the money will actually be spent on, backed by real monitoring rights. That one missing clause is what let Gensol’s diversion run for over a year before anyone caught it, and what let GoMechanic’s founders keep the truth from investors for years.
Diverted or fabricated money is one problem. Who was allowed to keep making the decisions while it happened is the next one.
3. When the Founder Becomes the Institution
3.1 Founder Control and Board Independence
Indian founders usually keep outsized control of the board long after institutional money would normally have diluted it, through nomination rights and veto clauses built into shareholder agreements. Two very different companies show what happens when that control lasts too long.
At Byju’s, by June 2023 the board was down to just three people — founder Byju Raveendran, his wife and co-founder Divya Gokulnath, and his brother Riju Ravindran — after three independent directors nominated by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), Prosus, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative all resigned within days of each other, saying they could not get basic financial documents out of management. Prosus later put it plainly in a public statement: despite repeated efforts by its board representative, Byju’s management kept ignoring advice on strategy, operations, and corporate governance.
At BharatPe, the fintech unicorn founded by Ashneer Grover, an independent governance review by Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas in early 2022 found overriding of internal controls, irregular vendor payments, and personal expenses billed to the company. Grover was pushed out as managing director, and his wife, Madhuri Jain, who had headed BharatPe’s internal controls, was terminated and later accused by the company of a fraud running into tens of crores of rupees. Both cases show the same thing: a board built entirely around the founder’s family and allies cannot catch problems the founder’s family and allies create.
3.2 Audit and Financial Reporting
The Byju’s board exodus followed, rather than caused, the resignation of its statutory auditor, Deloitte Haskins & Sells, which said it could not complete the audit because the company had not given it financial statements on time. Byju’s had not filed audited accounts since FY 2020–21 by the time the Enforcement Directorate raided its offices in 2023 — a plain breach of Sections 129 and 137 of the Companies Act, 2013, separate from any fraud finding. An auditor walking away is one of the clearest public warning signs a company can send, because auditors are personally responsible for signing off on numbers they cannot verify. It was Deloitte’s refusal to sign, not any single news report, that finally broke the market’s trust in Byju’s numbers.
3.3 Related-Party Transactions
Section 188 of the Companies Act, 2013 governs deals between a company and its “related parties” — a term that, under Section 2(76), covers directors, senior managers, their relatives, and any company under common promoter control. Every related-party deal needs the board’s approval first, no matter the amount. Deals above certain thresholds — 10% of turnover for goods and services, 10% of net worth for property — also need shareholder approval, and the related party is not allowed to vote on it. Listed companies face extra rules under SEBI’s LODR Regulations, including mandatory sign-off from the audit committee and public disclosure. The rule exists because a deal between a company and its own insider is, by nature, a deal where one person may be negotiating both sides.
Gensol’s EV-leasing deal with BluSmart is exactly the kind of transaction Section 188 exists to catch — yet SEBI found it was never disclosed as required, and that money moved through a fast “layering” of transactions between Gensol, BluSmart, and other entities without the scrutiny a proper board and shareholder vote would have forced. Byju’s Alpha, Byju’s American financing arm, tells the same story on a bigger scale: a US bankruptcy court found that roughly $533 million moved out of Byju’s Alpha through a chain of related entities, including a Miami hedge fund and offshore trusts, and held Riju Ravindran — a director of Byju’s Alpha and Byju Raveendran’s brother — personally liable for approving those transfers. Ashneer Grover’s own defence at BharatPe makes the point from the other side: in his 2022 book, he argued that Indian founders should not have to follow “the western concept of arm’s length,” calling the entire idea of related-party rules “totally irrelevant” to how Indian family businesses actually work. That attitude is precisely what Section 188 exists to override.
Section 188 does not ban related-party deals; it demands they be disclosed and approved properly. Gensol was not punished for dealing with BluSmart — it was punished for hiding how much was moving and on what terms. The lesson for any startup group with sibling companies under common founder control, which describes a large part of the Indian ecosystem, is that related-party approval cannot be a rubber stamp. It needs an audit committee that actually questions the commercial terms — the exact check that Gensol, Byju’s, and BharatPe all lacked at the relevant time.
So far, every failure here played out inside India. Byju’s shows what happens once the same problems cross a border.
4. When Corporate Problems Cross Borders
4.1 Corporate Flips
Many Indian startups have “flipped” at some point — restructured so a foreign holding company, usually a Delaware C-Corporation or a Singapore Pte Ltd, sits above the Indian operating business, mainly to attract foreign venture capital and use more familiar listing rules. Byju’s used exactly this kind of structure: its $1.2 billion loan in 2021 was raised through a US financing subsidiary, Byju’s Alpha, rather than by the Indian company directly. That one choice put a large share of the group’s debts — and the later fight over the missing $533 million — inside a US bankruptcy court instead of an Indian one. The opposite trend, “reverse flipping,” picked up speed after the government amended Rule 25A of the Companies (Compromises, Arrangements and Amalgamations) Rules, 2016 in September 2024, letting a foreign parent merge back into its Indian subsidiary through a fast-track process that skips NCLT approval entirely. Razorpay, PhonePe, Groww, and Meesho have all used this route to move their parent company back to India ahead of planned stock market listings. Either direction of the flip triggers FEMA: an outbound flip must follow the Overseas Investment Rules, 2022, and an inbound reverse flip must satisfy the Cross-Border Merger Regulations, 2018 and the Non-Debt Instruments Rules, 2019, with any of the parent’s foreign loans becoming the Indian company’s liability, subject to External Commercial Borrowing limits.
4.2 FEMA and Foreign Investment
Byju’s shows what happens when a company’s foreign money flows are never squared up with FEMA’s paperwork. Every rupee of foreign investment coming into an Indian company is supposed to be reported to the RBI through standard forms — mainly form FC-GPR when new shares are issued to a foreign investor. The Enforcement Directorate’s investigation found that Think & Learn, Byju’s parent, had received about ₹28,000 crore in foreign investment between 2011 and 2023 and sent out over ₹9,700 crore abroad, without ever getting its accounts audited as the law requires. In November 2023, the ED sent show-cause notices to the company and to Raveendran personally, alleging FEMA violations — over export earnings, delayed share allotments against money already received, and irregular outward payments — adding up to more than ₹9,362 crore. A look-out circular — an order that flags a person at immigration so they cannot leave the country — was issued, and later tightened, against Raveendran while the case continued.
4.3 Byju Raveendran and the Singapore Proceedings
The cross-border story kept growing through 2025–26, on a completely separate track: an arbitration dispute over Qatar Investment Authority’s funding arrangements around Aakash Educational Services and a holding company called Beeaar Investco. Qatar Holdings won a US$235 million arbitration award through the Singapore International Arbitration Centre and went to the Karnataka High Court to enforce it; in September 2025, the court froze Raveendran’s and Byju’s Investments’ assets pending that enforcement. Then, in May 2026, Singapore’s High Court found Raveendran in civil contempt — meaning he had knowingly disobeyed a court order — for repeatedly failing to disclose his assets as ordered since April 2024, and sentenced him to six months in jail plus S$90,000 in costs, though part of the sentence was later put on hold pending appeal. At the same time, a Delaware bankruptcy court entered a default judgment holding him personally liable for over $1 billion tied to the missing Byju’s Alpha loan money, after finding he had repeatedly ignored orders to hand over documents and evidence in that case too.
No single court or regulator in this story sees the whole picture. Indian FEMA proceedings, a Singapore arbitration and contempt case, and a US bankruptcy judgment are each looking at one slice of the same conduct, using different rules and different punishments, with nothing forcing them to talk to each other. The lesson is that a cross-border structure does not spread out legal risk — it multiplies it. Every country a founder’s business touches becomes its own venue where liability can land, and refusing to cooperate in one court tends to make things worse in every other court at the same time.
By this point, the regulators had noticed too.
5. The New Regulatory Reality
Gensol, Byju’s, BharatPe, and GoMechanic all show that Indian unicorns now answer to more than one authority at once, and often at the same time. SEBI polices stock-market integrity and disclosure once a company is listed or has listed debt, as at Gensol. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) can investigate mismanagement and fraudulent reporting directly, under Sections 210 and 212 of the Companies Act, 2013 — it did this at both Gensol and Byju’s. The RBI, through FEMA, governs every cross-border rupee that moves in a foreign-funded round or a corporate flip. The Enforcement Directorate prosecutes FEMA violations and, where money diversion turns into laundering, offences under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002. The NCLT handles insolvency once a creditor defaults, as it did for Byju’s parent after the BCCI’s ₹158.9 crore claim — proceedings the Supreme Court later restored after finding that the appellate tribunal (NCLAT) had approved a settlement without following the correct legal procedure. Economic Offences Wings at the state police level, as with GoMechanic, can bring criminal charges of cheating and forgery against founders directly. And foreign regulators and courts — the US SEC, Singapore’s courts and arbitration bodies, US bankruptcy courts — now reach Indian founders directly, as Raveendran’s case shows. No pitch deck, and increasingly no term sheet, can be written today without assuming several of these bodies might eventually look at the same deal from different angles.
None of this is impossible to fix. It just has to be built in from the start, not bolted on after a notice arrives.
6. Building a Legally Mature Unicorn
6.1 Legal team. Bring in in-house counsel well before Series B, not after a regulatory notice arrives — by the time Gensol and Byju’s brought in outside lawyers, the disclosures were already overdue.
6.2 Financial controls. Any promise about how loan or investment money will be spent needs independent, regular checking, not just the founder’s word — the exact control Gensol lacked, which let its diversion run for over a year.
6.3 Independent governance. Independent directors need real, contractual rights to information that do not depend on management’s cooperation, so they cannot simply be starved of documents the way Byju’s and BharatPe’s boards were.
6.4 Related-party controls. Every related-party deal should get an independent valuation and price comparison before the audit committee signs off — closing the exact gap SEBI found at Gensol and that Grover openly dismissed at BharatPe.
6.5 Pitch-deck verification. Revenue, customer, and technology claims should be independently checked before a round closes, not after — the one control that would have stopped both YouPlus and GoMechanic.
Conclusion: From Valuation to Accountability
Gensol’s diverted loans, GoMechanic’s fabricated revenue, BharatPe’s family-run board, and Byju Raveendran’s liabilities across three continents all trace back to the same root cause. It is not that Indian startups raised too much or promised too much — venture capital has always rewarded big claims. It is that the legal groundwork meant to hold founders to those claims — Section 188 approvals, real audits, independent board seats, FEMA reporting — was treated as paperwork instead of infrastructure. A billion-dollar valuation only measures how much investors believed a story. It was never built to measure whether that story could survive being checked. As India’s regulators start coordinating more, and as foreign courts show they are willing to reach Indian founders directly, the market is starting to price that difference in. The startups that define India’s next decade will be the ones that treat governance as the foundation a valuation is built on, not the price of admission to a stock exchange.
References
Primary legal materials
- Companies Act 2013
- Companies (Meetings of Board and its Powers) Rules 2014
- Companies (Compromises, Arrangements and Amalgamations) Rules 2016, as amended by Notification G.S.R. 555(E) (17 September 2024)
- Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999
- Foreign Exchange Management (Non-Debt Instruments) Rules 2019
- Foreign Exchange Management (Cross-Border Merger) Regulations 2018
- Foreign Exchange Management (Overseas Investment) Rules 2022
- Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016
- Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002
- Securities and Exchange Board of India (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations 2015
- Securities and Exchange Board of India (Prohibition of Fraudulent and Unfair Trade Practices relating to Securities Market) Regulations 2003
- Glas Trust Company LLC v Byju Raveendran & Ors, 2024 INSC 811 (also reported at 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3032)
- SEC v Shaukat Shamim and YouPlus Inc, Complaint, No 3:20-cv-04008 (ND Cal, 2020)
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