In July 2022, Vedantu let go of about 100 people. In December it cut 350 more. For a company that had celebrated a billion-dollar valuation less than a year earlier, it was a hard reversal, and the reason was plain: the money that had funded Indian edtech was drying up.
The company's founders, Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Anand Prakash and Saurabh Saxena, are all described as IIT alumni. Their idea, launched in 2014, was live online tutoring for students in classes 4 to 12, mostly CBSE and ICSE, with extra tracks for JEE foundation, NEET and NTSE. The name joins two Sanskrit roots: Veda, knowledge, and Tantu, network.
The company's founders, Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Anand Prakash and Saurabh Saxena, are all described as IIT alumni.
The early funding came in steps. A $5 million Series A from Accel and Tiger Global, then $11 million led by Omidyar Network, then $42 million in 2019. The pandemic turned the model from an option into a necessity. In July 2020 Coatue led a $100 million round, and in September 2021 another $100 million, led by ABC World Asia, made Vedantu a unicorn.
Then came the spending. The company bought Instasolv, a doubt-solving app, in February 2021 and took a majority stake in Pedagogy that July. It lost INR 696 crore in FY22. There had also been a data breach in 2019 that exposed about 687,000 users.
The layoffs of 2022 were the bill. What followed was less dramatic and more instructive. Vedantu cut costs, and the losses fell: about INR 158 crore in FY24, with revenue near INR 185 crore. Krishna told the press in 2025 that the company had turned profitable in the fourth quarter of FY25, with free cash flow of INR 6 crore and collections of INR 284 crore for the year. These are company figures, and the full-year accounts had yet to be filed when reports appeared.
A company that raised hundreds of millions and then shrank to find its footing is not the usual unicorn story, and it should not be dressed up as one. But it is a useful one. The founders' next phase was not about growth at any price. It was about how little a business could burn and still serve students.
For a first-time founder the point is blunt: funding rounds can be reversed by the market, and cash flow cannot be argued with.