Unacademy’s $3.44 billion valuation to $200 million acquisition by upGrad: Gaurav Munjal reflects on journey

Edtech company upGrad, led by Ronnie Screwvala, completed its buyout of Unacademy for over $200 million. The deal was confirmed on Tuesday in a post on X by Unacademy co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal.

Munjal, in his social media post, said, "Six years ago today, Unacademy became a unicorn. Today, Unacademy has closed its acquisition by UpGrad for just over $200M."

However, he added, “We raised at a peak, but sold at a fraction of that.”

The sale price was a fraction of the edtech company's peak valuation of $3.44 billion.

The company was started by Munjal along with co-founders Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sumit Jain. Munjal said that when the company was started, their first goal was to 'democratise education'.

Munjal said that while the company was not able to completely capture the economic value of the mission, it did manage to change the face of online education in India, and several of its products ended up becoming the template that the sector would go on to follow.

"When @RomanSaini and I started Unacademy with @hemezh and @sumjain, the mission was to democratise education. We didn't end up capturing all the economic value of that mission. But we changed what online education looks like in this country, and the products we built became the template for the entire sector," he said.

Munjal highlights importance of educators

In his post, Munjal also highlighted the importance of educators and how his free platform helped create an entire generation of celebrity educators.

He pointed out that the total YouTube videos by Unacademy's educators have touched 100 billion views.

"Unacademy's free platform created a generation of celebrity educators. Educators are a cornerstone of any economy, and they should be celebrated, and our platform enabled that in our country," Munjal said.

He also spoke of Airlearn, which, as per his post, became one of the top 3 most downloaded language-learning apps in the entire world within two years of its launch.

"We always wanted to build a global consumer product out of India. We did," he said.

Munjal said that the company had a topline of around ₹400 crore, while it had ₹900 crore in the bank, which gave them enough cushion required to go on independently. "Nobody was forcing this. But sometimes, you are drawn towards a path that is more exciting than the one that makes you more money," he said regarding the decision to sell the company.

Munjal also admired Ronnie Screwvala in his post, saying that he was inspired by the latter's vision for education in India. "I always walked away with the thought that it would be fantastic to work with him," he said, adding that since there was no pressure of running out of money, there was time to think the decision through.

"The more we did, the clearer it got: this is a better path for the ecosystem, not just for us," he added.

In his post, Munjal also thanked other startup founders without whom he said he would have "personally given up when things got really hard: Shailendra Singh, Deepinder Goyal, Bhavin Turakhia, Sujeet Kumar, Bhavish Aggarwal, Aakrit Vaish, Mukul Arora, Shantanu Rastogi and Karthik Reddy."