Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, the co-founders of edtech Unacademy, are reportedly exiting the company. According to a report by The Economic Times, the duo is leaving the company to focus on a language learning app, Airlearn.
This is a rare instance in the Indian startup landscape when the co-founders of an edtech company are stepping away. Hemesh Singh, the third co-founder of Unacademy, had already exited the company in June last year.
What’s next for Unacademy
As per the report, Sumit Jain, co-founder of Unacademy’s subsidiary Graphy, will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer of Unacademy. He joined the company after his startup, Opentalk, was acquired by Unacademy in 2020. Earlier, he founded a real estate platform, Commonflor, which Quickr acquired in 2016.
As for the financial health of Unacademy, Gaurav Mujal said in a post on X that the company has significantly reduced its cash burn and has ample capital in the bank. He said Unacademy’s cash burn was about Rs 1000 crore three years ago, which reduced to Rs 400 crore in 2024. Munjal claimed that the company aims to bring down its cash burn to Rs 200 crore this year.
The company has Rs 1200 crore in the banks, and its subsidiaries like Graphy and PreLadder are generating cash every month.
In the past couple of years, Unacademy has been focusing on the offline coaching mode, which is more capital-intensive than the online teaching mode. In a post on X in April, Munjal said that 70 percent of the offline centres of Unacademy will be profitable at the centre level by the end of this year. According to a report by Business Standard, Munjal did not want to lead an offline teaching business, and he had a board-level consensus on his exit.
What’s next for Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini
As per the ET report, Munjal and Saini are leaving Unacademy to focus on Airlearn, which is a standalone company. The language teaching company is a competitor of Duolingo. In a post on X, Mujal said that Airlearn is the fastest-growing company in the group and has 70,000 active users on the app daily. He added that the company has had $2 million in annual recurring revenue in the past 12 months.
According to Kredible, a data platform, the three co-founders of Unacademy, Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh, held a 15 percent stake in the company.