DELAWARE — Following a court order to repay $1.07 billion in missing funds, Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran filed an appeal Friday, arguing that misplacing ten figures is a “standard rounding error” in the high-stakes world of EdTech.

The bankruptcy case centers on a massive sum of money that vanished from the company’s accounts. While the court demanded immediate repayment, Raveendran’s legal team insists the cash isn’t gone, but merely “taking a gap year” to find itself.

“We aren’t saying the money is missing,” said Marcus Vandelay, Byju’s Senior Vice President of Looking Under The Rug. “We are saying it is currently in a very safe place that nobody, including us, can locate. It’s basically hide-and-seek, but with investors’ savings. To call this theft is to misunderstand the spirit of adventure.”

Lawyers for the founder argued that the U.S. court failed to account for the sheer difficulty of keeping track of that many zeros. They presented evidence suggesting that $1 billion takes up a lot of physical space and could easily have rolled behind a filing cabinet during an office move.

“If you lose a receipt for a coffee, nobody panics,” said Sarah Jenkins, Director of Creative Math at the firm. “But you lose the receipt for a billion dollars, and suddenly everyone wants to check your pockets. It’s unfair targeting of the forgetful.”

At publishing time, Raveendran was seen frantically patting down his jacket pockets and asking the judge if he had checked the center console of his car.

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