The video had 20,000 views, which for a student in Mumbai in 2010 felt like a stadium. Gaurav Munjal had shot it on a camera of about 0.02 megapixels, a Java tutorial for classmates who were struggling. He has often described the thrill of that number.
Munjal was born in Rajasthan in 1990 and went to St. Xavier's in Jaipur. He then studied computer science at NMIMS in Mumbai, not at an IIT, and he has said that stung. School friends had made it into the IITs. He told interviewers he felt insecure, and that non-IITians do not get the safety net of a guaranteed job. When service companies came to his campus with packages of about ₹3.2 lakh a year, he had already promised himself in his second year that he would not take one.
He then studied computer science at NMIMS in Mumbai, not at an IIT, and he has said that stung.
So he built things instead. With Hemesh Singh he made Flatchat, an app for finding flatmates, which was sold to CommonFloor. He worked at Directi. In 2015 he and Singh teamed up with Roman Saini, a man who had cracked the medical entrance at 16 and the civil services exam at 22. Saini served two years as an assistant collector in Jabalpur, then resigned to make UPSC preparation free online. He had once borrowed the coaching fee from a friend, and he said Unacademy was meant to bridge that gap.
The app launched in December 2015. Sequoia India and SAIF Partners put in $11.5 million in 2017. In 2019 the company introduced a paid subscription, Unacademy Plus, and raised roughly $87 million, including a direct investment from Facebook. By 2021 it was valued at $3.44 billion, and it was buying other education companies one after another.
Then came the bill. A data breach in 2020 exposed millions of accounts. Layoffs in 2022 and again in 2024 hollowed out the teams, and educators were put on notice as costs were cut. In 2023 a teacher was fired after a video urging students to vote for educated leaders went viral, pulling the company into a political storm. In 2024 Munjal announced zero appraisals in a video, wearing a $400 Burberry T-shirt, and the internet did not forgive him quickly.
By FY25 revenue was around ₹820 crore against a loss of about ₹436 crore. In March 2026 upGrad signed a term sheet to absorb Unacademy in an all-stock deal reported to value it at about ₹2,055 crore, a fraction of its 2021 peak, with Munjal expected to stay on as chief executive.
What a founder can take from this is uncomfortable. The same hunger that turns a 20,000-view video into a company can make a leader mistake growth for health. Munjal built a brand on proving the IIT crowd wrong; the harder lesson was learning when the proof was no longer the point.