In the exploding world of Indian ed-tech, few names evoke the kind of awe and inspiration as does Gaurav Munjal. As the co-founder and CEO of Unacademy, Munjal has done more than build a billion-dollar company. He’s led a movement to democratize education in the world’s second most populous nation, improving access to quality learning for millions of aspirants from the rising generation of Indians who represent their country’s best hope of competing in a rapidly changing world. His journey is a fascinating story of vision, perseverance, and rock-solid faith in the potential of online education, transforming Unacademy from a simple YouTube channel to a learning juggernaut with thousands of educators.
Come mid-2025, Unacademy is once again a titan of India’s fierce ed-tech space, a grizzled survivor of the pandemic boom and the so-called “ed-tech winter,” by luck or design riding the waves of hyper-growth, followed by thoughtful retreat, reconfiguration, and renewal. It represents Munjal’s dream come true to remove the time, cost, and place barriers to high-quality education and create a truly global learning experience that’s both affordable and accessible regardless of where one lives or one’s socio-economic status.
From Code to Content
Unacademy’s co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal’s entrepreneurial spark and love for teaching had been ignited well before Unacademy became the widely known platform that it is today. Born into a family with a rich educational legacy, Munjal had an inborn desire to disseminate knowledge from his childhood, allegedly starting to impart education to others even at the age of 16. Knowledge gained from his formal Computer Science education (B.Tech from NMIMS, Mumbai) helped him build a solid base in technology which became core to his later interventions.
His previous career experience included being a lead software engineer at Directi, India’s leading web tech company which built an ecosystem remarkably known for its discovery. This experience gave him practical knowledge of how complex creating strong tech products can be and how to build operations to scale. The corporate path, similar to many entrepreneurs, just wasn’t enough for his growing urge to create something meaningful and under his own direction.
The real ‘aha!’ The perfect opportunity for Munjal, and the intellectual grandfather to Unacademy, came in 2010. Still in college, he launched a YouTube channel focused on teaching programming concepts and skills. Though unassuming in nature, this SHEroes series of knowledge exchanges was the start of a personal light bulb moment—a discovery of the vast potential video content held to open up learning and create a community focused on education. The reach and engagement he saw on YouTube stoked the embers for a much bigger vision.
Before diving headlong into Unacademy, Munjal dove into other entrepreneurial projects, learning important startup lessons along the way. Probably the most successful of these was Flat. To, a social network for matching roommates and rented housing that was subsequently purchased by CommonFloor. While this experience would eventually lead to an exit, it was here that he first learned some of the invaluable lessons in building and scaling a consumer tech product, what a true market versus product fit looks like, and the rollercoaster ride that is a startup. Both of these experiences — the content creation and the business building — converged to set the stage for what would become Unacademy.
Birth of Unacademy: Democratizing Education.
The actual official launch of Unacademy happened in 2015. Gaurav Munjal launched the company along with his long-time collaborator and friend Hemesh Singh (who looked after technology and product), Roman Saini (ex-IAS officer who brought knowledge of competitive exam prep and content strategy) & Sachin Bansal (who took care of operations & content). Collectively, their vision was audacious but undiluted—a vision to create India’s largest online learning platform, starting with a laser focus on the country’s competitive exam prep market.
They made a very intentional bet on competitive exam prep (UPSC, NEET, JEE, GATE, CAT, etc.) because it was a big, underserved market with big pain points. Previous coaching methods were costly, limited by location, and non-personalized. Unacademy set about changing this by providing an alternative with:
Live Interactive Classes With experienced faculty that matter the most, Eruditus creates a unique immersive live experience, encouraging real-time engagement and doubt resolution. Structured Courses & Comprehensive Curriculum: Providing well-organized study plans, extensive test series, and practice questions to ensure thorough preparation.Emphasis on Accessibility & Affordability: Leveraging the internet to drastically reduce the cost of quality education, making it available to students even in remote towns, a stark contrast to the high fees of urban coaching hubs. Creating a Great Place to Live and Work In part, this meant creating a new platform where learners could easily find and communicate with one another, as well as educators, to encourage peer-to-peer learning and motivation.
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It wasn’t all smooth sailing in those early days. Persuading both students and world-renowned faculty to move from the traditional, offline learning environment to a strictly online format demanded a long-standing pursuit of trust building and providing value. Maintaining a uniform level of quality content at scale, keeping up with the always expanding user base, and improving the complex technology behind it all were ongoing challenges. That said, the founding team’s conviction and the clear market need pushed rapid adoption. Those early funding rounds, including from Blume Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners, helped give the startup the capital it needed to rapidly scale its operations and acquire its first users.
Scaling and Diversification: More than Just Competitive Exams
Unacademyay’s growth trajectory after 2015 was meteoric. Having deeply rooted itself in high-stakes competitive exam prep, the company seemed focused on much grander diversification efforts to reach more general learning audiences.
They methodically outgrew their original niche, serving an ever-increasing scope of government recruitment exams, university entrance exams, and professional licensing tests.K12 Segment Introduction Understanding that the core of education is at the school level, Unacademy expanded into K12 (Kindergarten to 12th grade) learning, providing foundational, school-level courses, as well as more personalized tutoring, to younger students. Skills & Professional Courses: The platform quickly extended beyond academic and competitive examinations into skill development and professional upskilling, often providing training in high-demand fields such as programming, design, data science, and business management to address identified needs for career advancement. Another important innovation to their revenue model was the launch of Unacademy Plus, a subscription product that gave students unlimited access to live classes, structured courses, doubt-clearing sessions, and test series from the best educators. This fast-track premium offering helped establish a predictable revenue stream while deepening engagement with the user base. A defining feature of Unacademy’s meteoric growth strategy was its rash of acquisitions. From 2020 to 2022, Unacademy gobbled up about a dozen or more smaller ed-tech startups like CodeChef (competitive programming),
PrepLadder (medical PG entrance), Mastree (K12 online coaching), Kreatryx (GATE and ESE), and more. These acquisitions were not just opportunistic, they were strategic, aimed at rapidly expanding their offerings, quickly onboarding new talent, gaining a ready user base in niche segments, and consolidating their market position. This capital-intensive strategy was all but launched thanks to three massive rounds of funding. Offline Foray (Unacademy Centres IN-PERSON). In a notable tactical move that began in late 2022 and accelerated in 2023-2024, Unacademy started to launch offline physical coaching hubs—now, called “Unacademy Centres.” This shift into offline education, a jarring pivot for a company founded on the principles of online learning, recognized the undeniable need for in-person classroom experience, regimented settings, and collaborative education that exists in some segments, especially for competitive exam prep. This was a big deal because it represented a hybrid approach, combining the advantages of online accessibility with the benefits of offline accountability.
Local governments’ diversification efforts were driven in large part by the unprecedented funding pouring into their coffers. Unacademy went on to raise rounds led by some of the biggest global investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, Facebook (now Meta), and Tiger Global. These multi-million-dollar rounds helped Unacademy become one of the first Indian edtech unicorns in 2020, reaching a valuation of more than $2 billion. The capital allowed it to speed product development and talent acquisition, fund an out-sized marketing push, and carry out its acquisition strategy.
Challenges, Adaptations, and Resilience
Unacademy’s path to success has definitely not been an easy one, especially these past few years.
The pandemic unleashed an unrepeatable set of circumstances that supercharged no-exit-ed-tech platforms, with growth peaking in 2020-2021. As economies reopened and offline activities stabilized, the ed-tech sector has gone into a correction period, sometimes referred to as the “ed-tech winter.” This change caused a massive and immediate online user acquisition slowdown.
Layoffs and Cost-Cutting
Per the Indian Express, like many other ed-tech companies around the world, Unacademy was under extreme pressure to cut costs and become profitable. This led to multiple layoffs through 2022-2024, displacing hundreds of workers. One thing we will say is that Gaurav Munjal was much more honest and direct with communication during these challenging times and repeatedly recognized the need for such harsh cuts in order to guarantee the long-term future of the company. The pendulum swung quickly from growth for growth’s sake to a focus on positive unit economics and ultimately profitability. The Indian ed-tech market is cut-throat, with both established and new players like Byju’s, Vedantu, Physics Wallah, and new age specialized platforms, coupled with a comeback of traditional coaching institutes. Given the intense competition, maintaining market share or product differentiation even for a short time often means continual reinvention and innovation. Raising the Hands-On Quality Control Bar at Scale Source: FHWA. As the platform rapidly expanded with the number of users, educators, and content types, upholding a high standard of educational quality, facilitating meaningful learner engagement, and meeting the wide spectrum of learning needs across a huge catalog of subjects became a difficult operational challenge.The shift to a hybrid (online + offline) model, though clever and more resilient, created new operational challenges and greater capital needs. Finding an equilibrium between the efficiency and scalability of online learning and the more localized need for physical centers has been an ongoing education process. Regulatory Landscape Going All In The ever-changing regulatory landscape and fast-paced public criticism that the education sector in India is often prey to only add to these security woes. Balancing these competing frameworks, maintaining a pace of business development, and bolstering user trust is a constant struggle.
Through these challenges, Unacademy has proven to be quite the fighter, quickly pivoting strategy and recalibrating goals to tackle a more efficient, sustainable future.
Gaurav Munjal’s Leadership and Vision
As we have witnessed over the past year, the leadership of Gaurav Munjal has attracted a passionate team of visionary folks who have joined in on the mission to transform transportation.
From foosball tables to bim bam bongo Gaurav Munjal’s leadership has been key to Unacademy’s rise. He is sometimes described as such due to his big picture, visionary thinking, cavalier growth mindset, and a willingness to bend the rules to get things done attitude. His communication style, blunt at times and clear always, has struck a chord in difficult times. He’s an operator’s operator, forever intensely hands-on with product and strategy.
Munjal’s personal commitment to democratizing education is just one part of this story, his conviction is a big part of the motivation. His long-term vision for Unacademy goes far beyond just being an exam prep supplier. He paints a very different picture that supports more varied and evolving educational needs across a learner’s lifetime, from foundational knowledge at the school level to mastery of competitive exams, to development of skills and professional upskilling.
Outside of Unacademy, Gaurav Munjal has become a notable thought leader and mentor in the Indian startup ecosystem. His wisdom on topics ranging from fundraising and scaling to talent management and how to navigate market cycles is in hot demand. Unacademy’s larger social impact is perhaps even more impressive though: it has opened up new paths for thousands of educators who can now teach to a larger audience, and it has brought quality learning opportunities to millions of students in rural areas who once never had access to world-class coaching.
Postscript: An Incomplete But Promising Legacy Conclusion
Gaurav Munjal’s story with Unacademy is indeed an interesting story that exemplifies the vision of an entrepreneur, the leverage of technology, and a passion for social causes. He took a simple notion of sharing educational content online and grew it into a multi-billion-dollar juggernaut that has completely revolutionized India’s education paradigm.
Unacademy’s true value-add is its successful mixing of accessibility with quality, democratizing high-stakes learning without the prohibitive cost. As the ed-tech sector grapples with unprecedented changes and emerging challenges, Gaurav Munjal’s nimble leadership complemented by his long-term vision to create a democratized learning ecosystem ensures that Unacademy remains an instrumental force in shaping India’s educational landscape, fulfilling its ongoing mission of fostering millions of empowered individuals through education.
