upGrad

Timeline

1. 2015upGrad is founded in Mumbai by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar and Phalgun Kompalli as an online higher education and upskilling company.
2. 2019The company builds its online degree business with partner universities, selling programmes that a working professional can take without leaving a job.
3. 2020Acquires Bengaluru based The Gate Academy, entering the test preparation market with 57 coaching centres and committing more than Rs 100 crore to the new subsidiary.
4. 2020The pandemic pushes learning online and the company raises capital and buys businesses through a period when most of Indian edtech was cutting costs.
5. 2021Temasek invests about 120 million dollars in April, one of a series of rounds that make the Singapore state investor a key shareholder.
6. 2022Files accounts showing operating revenue of Rs 679.1 crore and a loss of Rs 626.6 crore for FY22, with advertising spend of Rs 424 crore.
7. 2022Announces a plan to spend 30 million dollars on ten global campuses under the UGDX brand, five of them in India.
8. 2023Raises 40 million dollars from existing investors in March at a valuation of about 1.9 billion dollars.
9. 2024Gross revenue rises 25 per cent to Rs 1,715 crore in FY24, and Temasek puts in a further 60 million dollars in October.
10. 2024Co-founder and managing director Mayank Kumar steps down from day to day duties in October to start a venture placing Indian nurses and care workers in overseas markets.
11. 2025Begins formal talks to buy Unacademy, first reported in November at a valuation of 300 to 400 million dollars against a peak of 3.44 billion dollars.
12. 2026Signs an all-stock term sheet in March, with Unacademy founder Gaurav Munjal to stay on as chief executive.
13. 2026Files the merger application with the Competition Commission of India on 7 May, naming Sorting Hat Technologies as the target.
14. 2026Raises Rs 360 crore internally, with Ronnie Screwvala himself contributing Rs 300 crore and Temasek, the International Finance Corporation and 360 One making pro rata investments.
15. 2026The Competition Commission approves the combination on 7 July under Section 31(1) of the Competition Act.
16. 2026Completes the Unacademy acquisition on 1 September for just over 200 million dollars, about Rs 1,897 crore.
17. 2026Says it is running at a revenue run rate of Rs 2,400 crore and is targeting 35 per cent compound annual growth over the next decade.

What it does

upGrad sells education to adults. Its largest business is online and hybrid higher education, where it teaches degree, diploma and certificate programmes built with partner universities and sold to working professionals who want a qualification without stopping work. Around that core it has assembled study abroad counselling, enterprise training for companies, short professional courses and, since 2026, online test preparation for competitive examinations.^[1][14]

The company describes itself as an integrated learning and workforce development platform, which is a way of saying that it wants to hold a learner from the first short course to a master's degree to a placement. Its courses run online, at company offices through the enterprise arm, and at physical campuses through the UGDX brand and the Unacademy centres it has bought.^[7][2]

Three things distinguish the model from a traditional university. The programmes are co-branded with the institution that awards the degree, so the certificate carries a recognised name. The teaching is delivered online first, which is what allows a single company to reach learners in small towns. And the company buys the parts of the sector it cannot build quickly, which is why its history reads as a list of acquisitions rather than a list of product launches.^[2][14]

History

upGrad was founded in 2015 by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar and Phalgun Kompalli, and is run through UpGrad Education Private Limited. The early business was simple: find universities willing to let an outside company teach and market their programmes, and sell those programmes online to Indian professionals. The company was based in Mumbai and has stayed there.^[1][14]

The years that shaped it were the funding years of 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic pushed every kind of learning online and capital was cheap. upGrad used that window differently from the rest of the sector: while K-12 companies spent on advertising to win school students, upGrad bought businesses in higher education, test preparation and enterprise learning. It said later that it had pursued more than ten mergers and acquisitions, and that those costs were sitting inside its FY22 numbers.^[1]

The accounts for FY22 showed what that strategy cost. Operating revenue nearly doubled to Rs 679.1 crore, total expenses grew 2.5 times to Rs 1,300.6 crore, and the loss rose threefold to Rs 626.6 crore from Rs 211.1 crore the year before. Advertising and promotion alone cost Rs 424 crore, more than double the previous year, and employee benefit expense more than doubled to Rs 383.2 crore. The company's position at the time was that a growth company does not cut costs, it expands revenue, and that 85 per cent of its revenue would continue to come from online business.^[1]

The correction in edtech arrived in 2022 and 2023, when Byju's, Unacademy, Vedantu and a long list of smaller platforms cut staff and closed verticals as funding dried up. upGrad kept buying and kept hiring, and in the same period raised 40 million dollars from existing investors at a valuation of about 1.9 billion dollars. Gross revenue rose 25 per cent to Rs 1,715 crore in FY24, which is the last full year of accounts the company has discussed publicly.^[1][14]

From 2024 the emphasis moved to consolidation and to the public market. Mayank Kumar stepped back from the managing director role in October 2024 while staying on as a co-founder and director, and Screwvala took a more active role. In February 2025 Kumar said the company intended to list within two years, with the timing tied to reaching 750 million dollars of revenue, an 80 per cent gross margin and a 15 per cent net margin.^[14]

The largest transaction in the company's history followed. In November 2025 reports said upGrad was in talks to buy Unacademy in a deal valuing the test preparation platform at 300 to 400 million dollars, a fraction of the 3.44 billion dollar peak it had reached in 2021. The talks broke down over valuation, resumed, produced an all-stock term sheet in March 2026 and a formal merger filing with the competition regulator in May. The Competition Commission of India approved the combination on 7 July 2026, and the deal closed on 1 September 2026 for just over 200 million dollars.^[4][5][9]

Founders and leadership

Ronnie Screwvala is the founder and chairperson and, since 2024, the most visible operating figure at the company. He had already built and sold the media business UTV to Disney before starting upGrad, and his second act has been an education company assembled by acquisition. He has put his own money into it: of the Rs 360 crore internal round closed in 2026, he contributed Rs 300 crore himself.^[7][13]

Mayank Kumar, the co-founder and former managing director, ran the company through its expansion years. He stepped down from day to day duties in October 2024 to start a venture of his own in global talent mobility, beginning with nurses and geriatric care professionals going to European markets, while remaining a co-founder, director and shareholder at upGrad. Phalgun Kompalli, the third co-founder, is listed in the company's own filings and in the reporting on the founding.^[14]

Below the founders the company has had a fast changing senior team, which is normal for a business that has bought more than ten companies. Ankur Dhawan joined in 2020 to head the study abroad business, was elevated to chief product and technology officer in 2024, and had resigned by the middle of 2026. The company also appointed a chief financial officer from Dealshare and a chief product and technology officer from within, and reshuffled the leadership of its acquired businesses, including replacing the chief executive of KnowledgeHut with a former Byju's executive.^[12][15]

On the Unacademy side the arrangement after the acquisition keeps the founder in place. Gaurav Munjal continued as co-founder and chief executive of Unacademy after the deal closed, which the buyer described as keeping the person who built the online education products in charge of them. Sumit Jain, a co-founder who came into Unacademy through the purchase of CommonFloor, became chief executive of the test preparation business in 2025 and later moved into an advisory role as the merger completed.^[5][9][13]

Higher education

The original business remains the largest. upGrad sells master's degrees, postgraduate diplomas, bachelor's completion programmes and certificates in technology, management, data and design, built with partner universities in India and abroad. The learner keeps working, studies online in the evenings and weekends, and receives a qualification from the institution that upGrad partners with rather than from upGrad itself.^[1][16]

The company describes itself as India's top upskilling platform and sells to both individuals and companies. Its catalogue is dominated by the skills that Indian employers are hiring for: software engineering, data science, artificial intelligence, product management, digital marketing and finance. Programmes are sold directly through the website and through advisory teams that call prospective learners, which is why marketing is the single largest line in the company's expense sheet.^[16][1]

The company is also building the offline version of the same thing. Its UGDX plan, announced in 2022, was to put ten campuses in place across India, the United States, Singapore and the Middle East, with five of them in India, at a cost of 30 million dollars. The campuses are built inside partner universities rather than on land the company buys, which the company said keeps the capital cost low. It also said it had more than 150 PhDs on its faculty and had lined up another 1,000.^[2]

upGrad Abroad and study abroad

Study abroad is the second pillar and the one most exposed to a change in student demand. The company helps Indian students get into overseas universities, providing counselling, application support, visa help and often a pathway programme taught online in India before the student flies out. Ankur Dhawan, who led the vertical from 2020 and later became the company's chief product and technology officer, oversaw both the technology platforms and the international learner base.^[12]

The business matters to the company's economics because a study abroad customer pays far more than a short course customer, and because the same learner can be sold a pathway programme, a language course and a placement service. It also carries the company's main geopolitical risk: visa rules, currency movements and a slowdown in demand from any one destination country all show up directly in revenue.^[12][7]

Test preparation and the Unacademy acquisition

upGrad entered test preparation in 2020 by buying The Gate Academy, a Bengaluru based coaching institute for the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering and other public sector recruitment examinations. The academy had 57 centres, around two lakh enrolled learners and 76 million video hours consumed, and upGrad said it would invest more than Rs 100 crore in the subsidiary and build over 20,000 hours of content in multiple languages to reach at least a million test takers a year.^[3]

That was a small entry. The large one came six years later. In November 2025, reports said upGrad was in talks to acquire Unacademy, the platform founded in 2015 by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, which had become one of India's best known edtech unicorns during the pandemic. Unacademy had raised 440 million dollars in August 2021 in a round led by Temasek and valued at 3.44 billion dollars, and had raised roughly 860 million dollars in total.^[13][4]

By the time the talks began, Unacademy had been through a hard reset. Its revenue for FY24 was Rs 839 crore, down about 7 per cent year on year, its net loss narrowed 62 per cent to Rs 631 crore, its annual cash burn had fallen from more than Rs 1,000 crore to about Rs 100 crore, and it held about Rs 1,200 crore in cash. It had closed company run offline centres in favour of a franchise model and narrowed itself to its core test preparation business.^[13]

The negotiations ran for months and nearly ended twice. The first reports put the price at 300 to 400 million dollars; the two sides then fell out over valuation, with upGrad valuing itself at around 2 billion dollars for the share swap; the term sheet followed in March 2026; the merger filing went in on 7 May 2026 and described the transaction as a horizontal overlap in the wider market for non formal education in India. The competition regulator approved it on 7 July 2026 and the deal completed on 1 September 2026 at just over 200 million dollars, or about Rs 1,897 crore.^{[8][10][6][5]}

What upGrad bought is the online test preparation business across UPSC, JEE, NEET and GATE, plus a network of offline centres. It did not buy the language learning app AirLearn, which was carved out of the transaction for Munjal and Saini. The buyer's stated reason for the deal was straightforward: it had no presence in online test preparation, and this was the fastest way to get one. At the point of completion Unacademy had a topline of around Rs 400 crore and about Rs 900 crore in the bank, which is roughly what upGrad received in cash once the transaction closed.^[8][5][7]

Enterprise training and workforce development

upGrad Enterprise sells training to companies rather than individuals. The company runs executive and corporate programmes, reskilling cohorts and certification tracks for employers, and it owns businesses that sit beside this arm, including KnowledgeHut, which sells short professional and technology certifications, and Harappa Education, which teaches professional skills.^[14][15]

The company has framed the whole group as a workforce development platform, and it points at outcomes rather than course completions. It says it helped more than 55,000 learners into new jobs in the last financial year, and its capital is being directed towards artificial intelligence led learning products and placement work as much as towards new courses.^[15][7]

How the money is made

Almost all of upGrad's revenue is collected from learners in advance or in instalments. A degree or diploma programme is sold as a package of course access, teaching, mentoring and career support, with the university partner awarding the qualification and taking a share of the fee. The company earns the margin that is left after paying for content, faculty time, the university share and the sales cost of finding the learner. Because the sale happens before the teaching, the business is funded by its customers rather than by its investors, which is a genuine advantage over a company that has to build a product before it can charge for it.^[1][16]

The enterprise and study abroad arms earn differently. Enterprise training is sold to a company rather than an individual and is billed per cohort, which makes it lumpier but cheaper to acquire. Study abroad is a service business with high ticket sizes and a long sales cycle, where the customer pays for counselling, application help and pathway teaching before leaving India. The Unacademy acquisition added a fourth model, the traditional Indian coaching model of selling an annual subscription to a student preparing for an examination.^[12][5]

The cost structure is the thing to hold in mind. In FY22 advertising and promotion was Rs 424 crore against operating revenue of Rs 679.1 crore, so marketing alone consumed more than half the top line, while employee benefit expense was Rs 383.2 crore and the cost of materials Rs 259.8 crore. A company in that position depends on scale: the same course can be taught to more learners at almost no extra cost, which is why the company has been willing to run losses while it buys a bigger customer base. If the courses are good, the tenth learner is far more profitable than the first, and that is the whole bet.^[1]

Revenue and financials

The published history of upGrad's finances is short and mostly losses. For FY22 the company reported operating revenue of Rs 679.1 crore and a loss of Rs 626.6 crore, against revenue of about Rs 340 crore and a loss of Rs 211.1 crore in FY21. Total expenses were Rs 1,300.6 crore, of which advertising and promotion was Rs 424 crore and employee benefit expense Rs 383.2 crore. It also spent Rs 48.7 crore on information technology and Rs 43.3 crore on legal and professional fees.^[1]

For FY24, the company reported gross revenue of Rs 1,715 crore, a rise of 25 per cent over the previous financial year. It was last valued at about 1.9 billion dollars in March 2023, when existing investors put in 40 million dollars, and it had been valued at about 2.25 billion dollars before that according to the reporting at the time of its FY22 accounts.^[14][1]

The most recent number the company has given is a revenue run rate. Ronnie Screwvala told Moneycontrol that upGrad is operating at a run rate of Rs 2,400 crore and is targeting a steady 35 per cent compound annual growth rate over the next decade with a balance between Indian and overseas markets. That is roughly four times the gross revenue of FY24 and it is a projection rather than a filed figure, so it should be read as the company's own ambition.^[15]

The balance sheet has been strengthened twice in the same year. In 2026 the company closed a Rs 360 crore internal round, of which Screwvala contributed Rs 300 crore, Temasek Rs 45 crore and the International Finance Corporation together with 360 One Rs 16 crore. It then received close to Rs 900 crore in cash as part of the Unacademy transaction, which took its total capital pool to around Rs 1,260 crore.^[7]

Shareholding and ownership

upGrad is private and promoter led. Ronnie Screwvala is the founder, chairperson and the largest individual backer, and he has increased his exposure rather than diluted it, putting Rs 300 crore of the Rs 360 crore internal round in himself. Mayank Kumar remains a shareholder and director even after leaving his operating role.^[7][14]

The institutional register is dominated by Temasek, the Singapore state investor, which first invested about 120 million dollars in April 2021 and added 60 million dollars in October 2024, and which also led the round that took Unacademy to its 3.44 billion dollar peak. The World Bank's International Finance Corporation and IIFL are also named shareholders, and 360 One participated in the 2026 round.^[12][2][7]

The effect of the Unacademy deal on the cap table is unusual: Unacademy's investors were expected to receive a minority stake in upGrad rather than cash in the earlier structure that was discussed, which would have brought a new set of shareholders into the company. Because the final deal was smaller than first proposed, and because the cash on Unacademy's balance sheet came with it, the transaction left upGrad better funded without giving away a large block.^[10][7]

Employees and offices

upGrad is headquartered in Mumbai and says it has offices across about ten countries, which is the practical result of buying businesses in different markets and of selling study abroad services. Its employee base is split between content and faculty, sales and counselling, technology, and the operations of the acquired companies. Faculty is a deliberate part of the model: the company had more than 150 PhDs teaching in its programmes and said it had lined up another 1,000, who it says are allowed to keep doing research alongside teaching.^[2]

The company does not publish a headcount in the reporting on its accounts, so the reliable indicators of size are its spending and its acquisitions. Employee benefit expense of Rs 383.2 crore in FY22, the network of coaching centres it bought with The Gate Academy and Unacademy, and the enterprise training arm together describe a business that employs several thousand people rather than a few hundred. The most senior departures, including the managing director and the chief product and technology officer, have been reported as individuals leaving to build their own ventures rather than as part of a layoff programme.^[1][14][12]

The offices have followed the acquisitions. The company has employees in the cities where its acquired businesses were based, including Bengaluru, and sells into overseas markets through local offices and through the study abroad network, which is what allows it to say that it operates across about ten countries. Its physical campus plan under the UGDX brand places teaching inside partner universities in India, the United States, Singapore and the Middle East rather than in buildings the company owns, a structure the company says keeps the cost of international expansion low.^[2][12]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

• The Gate Academy, bought in 2020, a Bengaluru coaching institute with 57 centres and about two lakh learners, which took upGrad into test preparation.^[3]
• KnowledgeHut, a short course and certification business that now sits inside the group's enterprise and professional training work.^[15]
• Talentedge and Harappa Education, acquired to widen the higher education and professional skills catalogue.^[14][16]
• Exampur, a test preparation platform whose purchase was called off, leaving the acquired company to settle dues with former staff, an illustration of how often deals in this sector do not complete.^[15]
• Unacademy, bought in an all-stock deal signed as a term sheet in March 2026, approved by the competition regulator on 7 July 2026 and completed on 1 September 2026 for just over 200 million dollars.^[5][6]
• The UGDX campus plan, not an acquisition but a joint operating arrangement under which upGrad builds technology schools inside partner universities in India, the United States, Singapore and the Middle East.^[2]

The bid for Byju's parent

In 2026 upGrad submitted an expression of interest for Think and Learn, the parent company of Byju's, which had entered insolvency after lenders escalated disputes over its debt. It was the second known bidder after Manipal Education and Medical Group, and it was interested in specific assets rather than the whole company: the higher education and upskilling portfolio, including Great Learning, which overlaps directly with upGrad's own business.^[11]

Screwvala said in a statement that upGrad was not in the K-12 sector and had no interest in it, and that its focus was the parts of Think and Learn that serve college graduates and young learners. He also raised the question of assets that he said may have been disposed of without due process, and asked that any future rights issues in those entities be completed transparently so that a new owner could participate. For creditors, the difficulty is exactly this: the parts of the company that still generate cash are the parts that strategic buyers want, and the flagship K-12 business is the part in trouble.^[11]

Competition

upGrad competes on three fronts. In online higher education its rivals are the universities selling their own online degrees, other edtech platforms that broker the same programmes, and the growing number of Indian Institutes of Technology and management schools that have launched online qualifications of their own. In test preparation it now competes with Allen, Aakash and Physics Wallah after buying Unacademy. In enterprise learning it competes with global training companies and with the in house learning teams of large employers.^[13][11]

Its structural advantage is the breadth of the catalogue and the fact that the pieces can be sold to the same customer. A learner who buys a six month certificate can be sold a degree, a study abroad package and a placement. Its disadvantage is the cost of holding that breadth: the company has to advertise for every one of those products, and its marketing spend has historically been the largest single line in its accounts.^[1][7]

The consolidation strategy that produced the Unacademy deal is itself a form of competition. In a sector where capital has become expensive and several large platforms have been sold, restructured or wound down, the company with cash and a public listing plan can buy the customer base of the companies that cannot continue. That is what happened to Unacademy, and it is what upGrad was trying to do again with the assets of Think and Learn.^[13][11]

Controversies and criticism

The most persistent criticism of upGrad, and of the wider sector, is the gap between what a course costs and what it delivers. Indian edtech has been criticised for high pressure sales practices, for advertised placement rates that are hard to verify, and for programmes whose certificates carry less weight with employers than the marketing implies. The company's answer has been to measure placements rather than enrolments and to point at the number of learners it says it has moved into jobs, which it put at more than 55,000 in a year.^[15]

The company's accounts have drawn attention for the size of its losses and its advertising bill. A loss of Rs 626.6 crore on revenue of Rs 679.1 crore in FY22, alongside advertising spending of Rs 424 crore, raised the obvious question of whether the business could ever be profitable. The company's own position at the time was that it had no concerns about profitability given the growth rate, and that it would reach profitability in the long business run.^[1]

The Unacademy transaction invited a second kind of criticism, aimed at the sector rather than the buyer. Unacademy had been valued at 3.44 billion dollars in 2021 and was sold for just over 200 million dollars, a reset of about 94 per cent that raised questions about how Indian edtech valuations were set during the funding boom. Several rounds of layoffs at Unacademy before the sale, and the collapse of the earlier negotiations over price, were part of the same story.^[4][10][5]

The acquisition has also meant disruption for the businesses bought. Exampur, whose purchase was called off, delayed paying staff for months before settling, and the group's acquired companies have seen chief executives and founders leave, including the heads of KnowledgeHut and, at Unacademy, the departure of Sumit Jain from his operating role into an advisory one. Consolidation on this scale produces operating synergies on paper and uncertainty for the people inside the companies being merged.^[15][5][4]

Reading the numbers

Take the company's own numbers in the right order and the strategy is legible. Rs 679.1 crore of operating revenue in FY22 with a loss of Rs 626.6 crore was a company buying growth. Rs 1,715 crore of gross revenue in FY24 with a 25 per cent rise was a company that had stopped buying quite so fast. A run rate of Rs 2,400 crore in 2026 is a company that has added revenue by acquisition and believes it can now grow at 35 per cent a year.^[1][14][15]

The three figures that will decide whether it can list are gross margin, net margin and the mix between them. Kumar's stated test for an initial public offering was 750 million dollars of revenue at an 80 per cent gross margin and a 15 per cent net margin, which is a software-like profile rather than the profile of a business that pays faculty, counsellors and marketers. Nothing in the disclosed accounts yet shows a 15 per cent net margin; the FY22 net margin was deeply negative.^[14]

The capital position is the strongest part of the story. A capital pool of around Rs 1,260 crore after the Unacademy deal, a promoter who is willing to write a Rs 300 crore cheque himself, and an acquisition that came with roughly Rs 900 crore of cash mean the company can fund losses for a long time. That is also the risk: the market has learned to treat cash funded growth in Indian edtech with caution, and the company's next full year of accounts, not its run rate, is what will answer the question.^[7]

The honest summary is that upGrad has become the most durable large company in Indian edtech by not depending on any one product or market, and that it has not yet shown a year of profit. Investors reading this page should treat the run rate, the growth target and the listing plan as the company's own statements, and the FY22 and FY24 accounts as the only hard evidence available.^[1][15]

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