Startup Deep Dive : upGrad — it lost Rs 1,141 crore in a year, then bought a rival for a fraction of its old price

In the financial year ending March 2023, upGrad lost ₹1,141.5 crore in twelve months — more than the company now earns in three months of business. ₹410 crore of that was a single write-down on acquisitions that hadn’t worked out.

Three years later, the same company closed a deal to absorb Unacademy, once India’s brightest test-prep unicorn, in an all-stock transaction worth about $206 million (₹19.55 billion) — a company that had itself once been valued at $3.4 billion. upGrad went from writing off its own bad bets to buying a rival for a fraction of what that rival used to be worth. This is the story of how it got from one point to the other, told through the numbers on both sides.

Quick facts

What upGrad actually sells

upGrad is a higher-education and upskilling company that sells structured, fee-paying learning programmes to two kinds of buyers: working professionals paying out of their own pocket, and companies paying to train their employees. It is not a video library. Its core product is a curated online degree or certificate, built jointly with a university or industry partner — IIT Madras, IIMs, Liverpool John Moores University and others — and delivered through upGrad’s own platform, mentors and placement support. Since 2020 it has bolted on adjacent businesses through acquisition: enterprise training (Harappa), study-abroad counselling (Global Study Partners), recruitment and staffing, and, most recently, test preparation (Unacademy) and early-career internships (Internshala). The common thread across all of it is upskilling and employability for the Indian professional and student, sold as an outcome rather than as content.

The origin

upGrad was founded in 2015 by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar and Phalgun Kompalli. Screwvala is best known for building UTV into one of India’s largest media companies before selling it to The Walt Disney Company; upGrad was reportedly his second act after that exit, alongside his investment vehicle Unilazer Ventures. Mayank Kumar came from a vice-president role at Bertelsmann, the German media and education group, and had been looking to invest in Indian education without finding the right opportunity until he connected with Screwvala. Phalgun Kompalli, an IIT Delhi engineering graduate, had spent close to three years as a principal at The Parthenon Group, an education-focused consulting firm, after an earlier stint as a business analyst.

Their shared insight was simple: India’s job market was changing faster than its universities could retrain people for it. A four-year engineering or commerce degree, taken once in a person’s early twenties, was no longer enough to carry a career through decades of technology change. Working professionals needed a way to keep upgrading their skills without quitting their jobs to go back to full-time college — hence the name. The founders built upGrad to sit between the credibility of a university brand and the flexibility of an online product, rather than trying to be a university or a MOOC platform on its own.

The struggle years

upGrad’s growth years were also its most expensive. In FY22, revenue from operations rose to about ₹692 crore, but the net loss widened roughly threefold to about ₹627 crore, as per a Business Standard report from November 2022; a year later, reporting on the FY23 numbers put the FY22 loss slightly higher, at ₹648.2 crore — the two figures differ by less than 3%, most likely due to restatement, and both are given here rather than picking one.

FY23 was worse. Operating revenue crossed ₹1,000 crore for the first time, reaching about ₹1,194 crore on an Ind-AS basis (gross revenue of ₹1,530 crore), but the net loss surged 76% to ₹1,141.5 crore, according to a Startup Story Media report from November 2023. The company attributed a large part of that swing to a ₹410 crore goodwill write-down after an aggressive run of acquisitions in 2022 — six companies in a single year, including Harappa Education, INSOFE, Centum Learning, Exampur and Work Better — did not perform as underwritten.

The cost-cutting that followed was blunt. In March 2023, upGrad laid off around 120 people, close to 30% of the workforce at Impartus, the video-learning subsidiary it had bought for ₹150 crore in 2021, as per Business Today and Entrackr reports from that month. Roughly two months earlier, its enterprise-learning arm Harappa had cut about 60 of its 200 employees. In October 2024, co-founder and managing director Mayank Kumar stepped down from his day-to-day executive role to start a new venture, with Screwvala taking a more hands-on operating position at the company he had co-founded, as reported by YourStory.

The turning point

The reversal shows up cleanly in one metric: Ind-AS EBITDA. In FY24, upGrad’s EBITDA loss was ₹285 crore. In FY25, it flipped to a positive ₹15 crore — the company’s first EBITDA-profitable year — even as revenue from operations grew only 6% to ₹1,569.3 crore, as per a Business Standard report from December 2025. Net loss for the year nearly halved, falling 51% to ₹273.7 crore from ₹559.8 crore in FY24.

That was not a one-year blip. In FY26 (the year to March 2026), Ind-AS EBITDA jumped more than eightfold to ₹123 crore on gross revenue of ₹2,070 crore, up 7% year-on-year, while net loss narrowed by a further 52% to ₹130 crore — the third consecutive year in which upGrad’s losses have more than halved, as per an August 2026 Financial Express and BW Disrupt report. The turnaround came from trimming costs rather than chasing growth: employee benefit expenses fell about 5% and advertising spend fell about 11% in FY25 even as revenue rose, per a December 2025 report citing the company’s FY25 filing. Having proved it could run the existing business at close to break-even, upGrad went back to acquiring — but this time paying largely in its own shares rather than cash.

The money behind it

upGrad has raised roughly $783 million across ten rounds from about 17 investors, as per Crunchbase data compiled around October 2024. Three backers stand out. Temasek, the Singapore state investment firm, first invested in 2021 and returned with an additional $60 million in October 2024 at a flat valuation of $2.25 billion, taking its stake to an estimated 20–21%; Temasek’s repeat backing has functioned as the company’s main institutional credibility signal ahead of a planned listing. The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector arm, put in $40 million in the same 2021 round that made upGrad a unicorn, lending a development-finance stamp that mattered for its international and access-oriented programmes. IIFL (India Infoline Finance) added $25 million in that round and has stayed on the cap table since.

The 2021 unicorn round itself is worth pausing on: the first tranche of about $120 million, led by Temasek, closed in April 2021 at a valuation of just over $600 million; by August 2021, with IFC and IIFL joining, the same continuous round had pushed the valuation to $1.2 billion, as reported by TechCrunch and Entrackr at the time. That doubling in four months is what financed the acquisition spree of 2021–22 — and, indirectly, the goodwill write-down that followed it in FY23. In October 2024, alongside the Temasek top-up, Screwvala personally bought out Bharti Enterprises’ roughly 1% stake for $20 million, consolidating his own holding to about 45% ahead of the company’s IPO plans.

How it makes money

upGrad earns in two ways. The larger share comes from individual learners paying programme fees directly — either upfront or through instalment plans — for degrees, certificates and skilling courses run jointly with university and industry partners. The smaller but faster-growing share is enterprise revenue: companies paying upGrad to train and reskill their own employees, a model that carries higher margins, lower customer-acquisition cost and more predictable, contracted revenue than one-off consumer sign-ups. A portion of student fees is explicitly deferred rather than recognised as revenue upfront — upGrad reported ₹556 crore of collections not yet recognised as revenue in FY25 — which is a direct consequence of programmes that run for months and bill in instalments tied to completion.

The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating upGrad as a content company competing on course catalogue size, the way they might think of a MOOC platform. Its actual leverage is the university and employer relationship: it does not need to be a degree-granting institution itself, only the operating and distribution layer that a university or an employer would find too slow or too expensive to build alone. That is also why the acquisition trail — Harappa for enterprise learning, Global Study Partners for study-abroad counselling, and now Unacademy for test prep and Internshala for early-career placement — reads as a series of bolt-ons to widen the funnel around one core relationship, rather than unrelated diversification.

The numbers

Figures below are as publicly reported for each fiscal year; note that the FY26 figure is gross revenue (billings), while FY22–FY25 figures are revenue from operations under Ind-AS — upGrad’s Ind-AS operating revenue for FY26 had not been separately disclosed at the time of writing. All amounts in ₹ crore.

Read across the table, the FY23 spike in losses is the goodwill write-down year discussed earlier, and every year since has moved in the same direction: revenue up, losses down, EBITDA improving. Three straight years of losses more than halving is unusual for an Indian consumer-facing internet company at this stage, most of which either stayed loss-making for longer or cut so hard on the way to profitability that growth stalled. upGrad’s revenue kept growing through the cost-cutting, which is the detail that made the subsequent return to acquisitions credible to its board and backers rather than reckless.

Where the money comes from

By upGrad’s own account to Forbes India in a March 2025 cover story, consumer programmes (B2C) made up roughly 80% of revenue at that point, with enterprise solutions (B2B) at about 20%; the company’s stated plan was to shift that mix toward 70:30 within two years by growing enterprise faster. Separately, international learners — largely through study-abroad transfer programmes where students begin coursework online in India before moving to a partner campus in the UK, US or Australia — were reported to contribute more than 20% of revenue in FY25 and growing, per company statements cited in coverage of the FY25 results.

The surprise, given how much upGrad talks about its international ambitions and its global learner base, is how domestic and consumer-driven the business still is: on these figures, roughly four out of every five rupees of revenue came from Indian individuals paying for their own upskilling, not from enterprises or from international operations, as of the most recent breakdown available. The stated strategy is to change that ratio deliberately over time rather than because the domestic business is shrinking.

The risks

Three risks stand out, each grounded in something upGrad or its founder has already said or already lived through. First, integration risk from acquisitions: upGrad has already taken one large goodwill write-down, ₹410 crore in FY23, after a 2022 buying spree, and it has now added two more all-stock deals in 2026 — Unacademy and a 90% stake in Internshala — that will need to be absorbed operationally and culturally without repeating that outcome. Second, sector-credibility risk: Screwvala himself told Forbes India in March 2025 that the collapse of rivals such as Byju’s had “slowed down the opening up of the market” and damaged trust among students and universities in Indian edtech broadly, a reputational drag that upGrad did not cause but has to work against. Third, demand risk tied to discretionary spending: upGrad’s own leadership has acknowledged there is limited forced urgency behind upskilling purchases — professionals tend to invest in retraining only when they feel job-insecure or are already unemployed, rather than on a fixed cycle — which makes consumer enrolment volumes sensitive to the broader job market and hiring sentiment in a way a company selling a more essential product would not be.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from upGrad’s decade is less about edtech and more about sequencing capital-funded growth. Cheap, fast-doubling funding rounds — upGrad’s valuation went from just over $600 million to $1.2 billion in four months in 2021 — make it easy to buy scale through acquisitions before you have proven you can run the business you already have at a sane cost. upGrad found that out the hard way with a ₹410 crore write-down and a round of layoffs. What is less common is what it did next: it stopped acquiring, spent three straight years cutting costs and pushing EBITDA from a ₹285 crore loss to a ₹123 crore profit, and only then went shopping again — this time paying in its own equity rather than cash it did not have to spare. Proving you can run the core business profitably, before spending on the next one, is the part of the playbook most acquisitive startups skip.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded upGrad and when?

upGrad was founded in 2015 by Ronnie Screwvala, the media entrepreneur who earlier built and sold UTV to The Walt Disney Company, along with Mayank Kumar, previously a vice president at Bertelsmann, and Phalgun Kompalli, previously a principal at The Parthenon Group.

Is upGrad profitable?

Not yet at the net-income level, but it has turned Ind-AS EBITDA-positive: after an EBITDA loss of ₹285 crore in FY24, it reported positive EBITDA of ₹15 crore in FY25 and ₹123 crore in FY26, while net losses have narrowed for three consecutive years, most recently to ₹130 crore in FY26, as per company-reported figures covered in the trade press.

What is upGrad’s current valuation?

upGrad was last valued at $2.25 billion (about ₹21,600 crore) in October 2024, when Temasek invested an additional $60 million at a flat valuation, as reported by Business Standard and Outlook Business.

Has upGrad really acquired Unacademy?

Yes. upGrad completed an all-stock acquisition of Unacademy on 1 September 2026, valuing Unacademy at about ₹19.55 billion (roughly $206 million) — about 94% below Unacademy’s 2021 peak valuation of $3.4 billion, as reported by TechCrunch and YourStory.

Is upGrad planning an IPO?

Founder Ronnie Screwvala has said he expects to take upGrad public within roughly seven to eight quarters of statements made in late 2024 and early 2025, framing the listing as a credibility milestone rather than a fundraising need, as per interviews cited by Forbes India and Outlook Business; no formal IPO filing has been reported as of this writing.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Business Standard, December 2025 — “Upgrad narrows loss for FY25 to ₹273 crore, revenue rises over 5%”
• Inc42, October 2025 — “upGrad Halves FY25 Loss To INR 273.7 Cr, Revenue Up 6%”
• Entrackr, October 2025 — “upGrad turns EBITDA positive in FY25; reports Rs 1,943 Cr gross revenue”
• Financial Express / BW Disrupt, August 2026 — “UpGrad Narrows Net Loss 52% To Rs 130 Cr In FY26, Gross Revenue Reaches Rs 2,000 Cr”
• Outlook Business, October 2024 — “upGrad Raises $60mn from Temasek at $2.25bn Valuation”
• Business Standard, October 2024 — “Temasek invests $60m in Upgrad, valuation holds steady at $2.25 billion”
• TechCrunch, August 2021 — “India’s upGrad enters unicorn club with $185 million fundraise”
• Entrackr, August 2021 — “upGrad graduates to unicorn batch with $1.2 Bn valuation”
• YourStory, October 2024 — “upGrad co-founder Mayank Kumar steps down to launch new venture”
• Business Today, March 2023 — “upGrad lays off 120 employees in second round of job cuts”
• Entrackr, March 2023 — “upGrad Campus, formerly known as Impartus, lays off 30% of employees”
• Startup Story Media, November 2023 — “upGrad Reports INR 1,141.5 Crore Net Loss in FY23 Despite Crossing INR 1,000 Crore Operating Revenue Milestone”
• Business Standard, November 2022 — “Upgrad’s revenue rises to Rs 692 cr in FY22, losses widen to Rs 627 cr”
• Business Today, July 2022 — “upGrad acquires Harappa Education for Rs 300 cr”
• Inc42 — “upGrad Acquires Video Learning Platform Impartus For INR 150 Cr”
• TechCrunch, September 2026 — “India’s Unacademy sells to rival upGrad for $206M, about 94% less than its peak valuation”
• YourStory, September 2026 — “upGrad wraps up Unacademy acquisition at $200M”
• Forbes India, March 2025 — “upGrad’s IPO is on the horizon. Can it unlock its full potential?”
• Medianama / Entrackr, February 2026 — “upGrad Acquires 90% Stake in Internshala”
• Crunchbase (funding data compiled October 2024) — upGrad company and funding-round profiles

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