“Munjal no longer wants to operate the offline business and is refocusing the company on its core online platform,” said a person familiar with the matter. “He has held discussions with edtech firms including Aakash, PhysicsWallah and Vedantu about selling the tuition centres for roughly Rs 80 crore, but those talks have yet to progress.”
Industry executives said the edtech sector continues to face structural challenges, but added that Unacademy’s difficulties stem largely from execution issues rather than broader industry weakness.
Unacademy’s revenue has declined over the past three years, falling to Rs 820 crore in fiscal 2025 from Rs 1,044 crore in fiscal 2023, according to a report by Entrackr. The company has raised a total of $880 million from investors, according to data platform Tracxn.
Ronnie Screwvala’s upskilling firm upGrad recently walked away from talks to acquire SoftBank-backed Unacademy, ending one of the edtech sector’s most closely watched deal discussions amid differences over valuation. The proposed all-stock transaction was said to value Unacademy at about $300 million, a steep drop from its $3.4 billion peak in 2021, while upGrad was seeking a valuation of roughly $2.25 billion for itself, people familiar with the matter said. The collapse followed an earlier failed sale effort by Unacademy. In 2024, the company held talks with Kota-based Allen Career Institute that also fell apart over valuation disagreements. Such developments come amid a turbulent period that has included pushback over changes to its employee stock option policy.
But Munjal recently told employees that the edtech company is shifting from a period of retrenchment to one focused squarely on growth, after a year marked by sharp cost cuts and improving unit economics across its core online businesses.
In an internal email, Munjal said Unacademy reduced cash burn in its test-preparation business to roughly Rs 200 crore in calendar 2024 from about Rs 450 crore a year earlier, a move he attributed to “hard calls” that included shutting down underperforming initiatives and concentrating resources on scalable products. Several of the company’s key exam-prep verticals — including UPSC, NEET PG and CAT — have turned contribution-margin positive, while subsidiaries PrepLadder and Graphy were cash-flow positive for the full year, he said.
Munjal highlighted the performance of Airlearn, Unacademy’s language-learning platform, which he said grew from about $200,000 in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2025 to nearly $3 million by year-end. The results, he wrote, reinforced the company’s belief that its competitive edge lies in digital-first education. “Unacademy has always been exceptional at one thing: building great online learning products,” Munjal said, adding that “when we do that well, at scale, the business works.”
As part of that recalibration, Unacademy plans to exit its company-operated offline centres over the coming months and convert them into franchise partnerships. Munjal said the franchise model is “asset-light, capital-efficient, and aligned with who we are”, and that once the transition is completed by April, the company expects to have “one of the healthiest cost structures in the sector”.
The changes set the stage for a renewed push in the year ahead. “CY 2026 is not about survival. It is about growth,” Munjal wrote, arguing that years of cost correction have left Unacademy with “a scaled online business that is profitable at the vertical level, and a global product that is growing faster than we expected”.
Munjal urged employees to look past external speculation and focus on execution. “The truth of a company is not in headlines,” he wrote. “It is in numbers, products, and people.”
An Unacademy spokesperson said the company is going back to its strengths. “Unacademy will be an online first company moving forth. Like it was when we started in 2015,” the spokesperson said.
 "Gaurav Munjal, the chief executive officer of edtech firm Unacademy")