Unacademy eyes profitability by early next year

BENGALURU:  At a time when profits remain elusive for edtech companies, edtech unicorn Unacademy is confident of achieving profitability by early next year. Its rival Byju’s recently reported over Rs 4,500 crore loss in FY21. People familiar with the development said Unacademy is expected to break even in a few months.

In July, Unacademy founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal in an email to employees said, “Even though we have more than Rs 2,800 crore in the bank, we are not efficient at all. We spend crores on travel for employees and educators. Sometimes it’s needed, sometimes it’s not. There are a lot of unnecessary expenses that we do.”

He added, “We must cut all these expenses. We have a strong core business. We must turn profitable asap.” Apart from profitability, the SoftBank-backed edtech company is also eyeing an IPO in the next two years.
In the first week of September, the learning platform launched 50 education channels which aim to increase accessibility of learners across academic and non-academic categories. Just like other edtech companies, Unacademy too started its offline centres. It launched its first two offline learning centres in Kota, Rajasthan in June. It also plans to increase the number of offline centres.

Unacademy Group comprises Unacademy, Graphy, Relevel and CodeChef. According to Tracxn, the edtech company is valued at $3.44 billion as on March 11, 2022 and it has 22 investors including Sequoia Capital, Blume Ventures and others. Its annual revenue as on December 31, 2020 was $50.1 million. It was founded by Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini in 2015. The edtech company has over 91,000 registered educators and 99 million learners.