Vedantu Clears The Air On Fraud Allegations After Months-Long Social Media Drama

Reacting to reports of Bengaluru Police summoning Vedantu founders in relation to allegations by a vendor of the edtech company, the company’s chief executive officer (CEO) Vamsi Krishna has again cleared the air and called it a case of corruption. 

The clarification follows allegations by one of Vedantu’s vendors since last year that the company had not paid them dues owed for services rendered. The allegations came up around June 2022 and in the latest tweet, the vendor Anuradha Tiwari had alleged that the Bengaluru Police had summoned Vedantu founders in a case related to delayed payments. 

The vendor, in question, also claimed that the founders, instead, sent a representative in place of the founders. But speaking to Inc42, the company said that the police wanted to follow up on a complaint raised online which tagged their Twitter handle, adding that the case was merely a civil case and not a criminal one.

Krishna also told Inc42 that there has been no FIR in the matter and called the row a ‘corrupt act.’

“We aren’t seeking any damages,it was just a corrupt act.. She (the vendor) is asking for payment and we cleared most of it, yet the situation has come to a standstill. The ongoing situation on social media whereby this person is making personal attacks is getting messier by the day,” said Krishna.

The corrupt act that Krishna was referring to involved allegations of kickbacks that the vendor paid to an ex-Vedantu employee. 

In a clarification tweeted last week, Krishna claimed that Anuradha Tiwari, the vendor, allegedly paid INR 25 Lakh to a former Vendatu employee as kickbacks in November 2021. An internal inquiry by the edtech company also purportedly revealed that the ex-employee was meant to be paid another INR 40 Lakhs on the clearance of the last invoice, but Vedantu claims to have caught the kickback scheme before this invoice was cleared. 

In her social media posts, Tiwari had alleged that the company had not paid the vendor the remaining amount despite multiple attempts to get this amount. The crisis erupted yet again after the vendor took to Twitter and LinkedIn to air her grievances. 

But Vedantu’s Krishna told us that of the total INR 2 Cr raised in the invoice by the vendor in 2021, the edtech company has already cleared 75% of the invoices.

In a LinkedIn post published on March 3 this year, Tiwari claimed, “… the Bengaluru Police HSR acted swiftly on my tweet exposing the fraudulent activities of Vedantu founders. The police summoned them to the police station, but these crooks chose to hide in their office and sent their hapless admin instead.”

She further went on to claim that the founders had ‘amassed a personal fortune by siphoning off funds, taking commissions from vendors, and intentionally delaying our payment just to pocket commissions, all while scamming thousands of parents and students.’

This is not the first time that the two sides have sparred with each other over the matter. The vendor had flagged the issues back last year which saw both sides fighting pitched battles on social media. Since then Vedantu had posted a rebuttal on LinkedIn as well. 

Founded in 2014 by Krishna, Anand Prakash, and Pulkit Jain, Vedantu is an edtech platform that primarily earns revenue from online coaching services it provides across various modules targeted at various categories of students. 

The allegations come at a time when the edtech major has been piling up heavy losses. The edtech unicorn’s loss widened to INR 696.2 Cr in the financial year 2021-22 (FY22) against a revenue of INR 168.9 Cr during the same period.

Not just that, the edtech company has also laid off more than 1,100 employees across multiple rounds last year, as it looked to push towards sustainability. It also expanded its offline play with a $40 Mn acquisition of Deeksha in light of its edtech rivals making inroads into the hybrid learning space.