India's Unacademy sells to upGrad for $206M, about 94% below peak

Unacademy, once one of India’s most valuable edtech startups, has been acquired by rival upGrad in an all-stock deal valuing it at just over $200 million — about ₹19.55 billion, or roughly $206 million — nearly 94% below its 2021 peak valuation of $3.44 billion. Unacademy shareholders are receiving upGrad shares as part of the deal, while angel investors were cashed out at closing, upGrad co-founder and chairperson Ronnie Screwvala told TechCrunch. Unacademy co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said on X Monday that the deal had closed, nearly six months after it was first announced in March.

“We raised at a peak, but sold at a fraction of that,” Munjal wrote. “I’m not going to dress these facts up.” The deal comes despite Unacademy having about ₹9 billion (roughly $94.8 million) in the bank and annual revenue of about ₹4 billion (around $42.13 million), Munjal said, adding that most of the startup’s businesses were profitable or close to it and that the company had the option to keep operating independently.

Founded in 2015, Bengaluru-based Unacademy, backed by SoftBank, Tiger Global, General Atlantic, and other global investors, spent heavily in 2020 and 2021 battling rivals like Byju’s for students and educators as pandemic lockdowns drove online-learning demand. After physical classes reopened and demand for edtech fell, the startup cut costs, laid off employees, and restructured, eventually bringing most of its businesses to profitability or close to it. But its leadership came to believe that scaling further, or eventually going public, would require expanding into more areas of education — something joining upGrad, with its larger offline-education presence, offered a path to, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Airlearn, Unacademy’s language-learning app, is also part of the deal and will remain under upGrad for now; Munjal and Screwvala are expected to decide within about six months whether to keep building the roughly 25-person business internally or raise outside capital for it. The two-year-old app serves 10 million users across more than 150 countries, Unacademy said. The Unacademy brand will be retained, the deal covers the entire group including PrepLadder and Graphy, and no layoffs are planned; Munjal will continue as CEO. Unacademy raised about $880 million across 13 funding rounds, per Tracxn — a sharp reversal for Indian edtech after Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, saw its valuation collapse and entered insolvency proceedings in 2024.

Why it matters

The deal is a stark marker of how far India’s pandemic-era edtech boom has deflated, and a sign that even startups with healthy balance sheets and profitable units are opting to consolidate rather than chase an independent path to scale.