Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

We’re on issue number 29 already! In case you’re just getting here though, Ed Set Go is The Ken’s weekly take on the $180 billion edtech industry. And it lands in your inbox every Thursday. You can now subscribe to ESG for a super reasonable Rs 99 a month, or sample our larger, eclectic bundle of newsletters—The Stack—for Rs 199 a month.

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Okay. Now that my little pitch is out of the way, let me dive right in.

Unacademy confounds me.

Only the second Indian edtech unicorn after Byju’s, 7-year-old Unacademy has a lot to commend it. It’s built an online test-prep business ground up which has about 600,000 paid subscribers, it’s been a talent magnet for the most coveted tutors in the country (by spending exorbitant amounts), and was the first edtech to obsess over the finer design and tech details of its platform. Unacademy’s co-founder, the chimeric Gaurav Munjal, can be largely credited with introducing a “Netflix-like play” in Indian edtech.

If Byju’s was genre defining, Unacademy strove hard to break any barriers it deemed artificial to edtech. On a coolness scale, it worked. As a business, it seemed… impractical.

Structurally, it tried to be both a house of brands (tutors) and an edtech brand in itself. 

And strategically, it chose to make acquisitions (house of brands again), but without much care for integration.

On both these fronts, Unacademy’s plans seem to be unraveling. Stories of layoffs, a toxic work culture, and Munjal’s aggressiveness have muddied its reputation. Its accelerated acquisition strategy—in part influenced by Byju’s—has been weakened. Mastree shut down. PrepLadder is curtailed. Graphy is… a creator platform?

Unacademy might have missed a whole bag of tricks in its mad rush to unicorn status. But my argument today is that it might have actually re-discovered its original trick, its original audience. Its original cheerleader.

The adult level

In February 2021, Unacademy bought a four-year-old edtech business called TapChief. At the time of its acquisition, TapChief had 150,000 registered users and seemed like a loose collection of opportunities for young professionals. Unacademy first renamed it “Unacademy Pro”, and later, Relevel. I’m not sure how prescient Munjal and gang were about their K-12 comedown, but in late 2021, Unacademy infused Rs 20 crore (~US$2.6 million) into Relevel, and started shaping it as a new upskilling-to-placement platform.