INSIDE UNACADEMY'S LAB OF RUSHED EXPERIMENTS

The startup is grappling with unsuccessful acquisitions and the challenges of establishing an offline presence

- Samiksha Goel

Ten managers in six months. That's the number of bosses a sales employee at Unacademy, an Indian edtech company valued at $3.5 billion, worked for, until December last year.

He was first hired for Next Level, a hiring platform Unacademy started in 2022. In two months, he was asked to join a live-streaming project, which was shelved in a month. The employee's final stop, before being laid off, was Graphy, a software as a service (SaaS) business.

"They laid off employees saying they were not performing," this person, who didn't want to be identified, said.

While experiments, speed, agility, the ability to start a business and shut it down quickly when it doesn't work, are considered normal in fast-growth startups, Unacademy, now nine-years-old, confronts an existential question. In the world of Indian edtech, there is a collective realization that the online piece of the market has hit a growth roadblock. Unacademy made a string of acquisitions between 2018 and 2022-about 13 of them and launched a series of new products. Most of them are now dead, or are operating on the sidelines, nine people, including former and current employees, told Mint. They didn't want to be identified.

Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Unacademy, doesn't agree with this assessment. But he does believe that the company spread itself too thin. In the new normal of a stagnating online market, and at a time when Byju's, India's largest edtech company, has spectacularly imploded, he has moderated his ambition, focusing on fewer products.

"Right now, I want to make the company profitable. I want to focus on my core business and two to three projects that I am working on," Munjal told Mint.