Unacademy launches gamified app for UPSC aspirants

Founder and chief executive Gaurav Munjal took to Twitter to make the announcement.

The app, called UnacademyX and only available on Google Play Store, helps break down complex syllabus into easy, bite-sized lessons to create an interactive and enjoyable learning experience that keeps students engaged and motivated, according to its description.

“Currently we are supporting OTP-based logins and payments from India only. We’ll look to expand soon,” Hardik Pandya, senior vice president of design at Unacademy, said in reply to a tweet seeking clarification on the availability of the app outside of India.

The new experiment at the Bengaluru-based startup comes at a time when the company is facing intense pressure to show profitability as Covid-led demand for digital learning drops, venture capital firms tighten purse strings and inflationary pressures affect technology companies globally.

Last month, Munjal told employees that the company was aiming to hit Ebitda-level (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) profitability within April, according to an internal memo reviewed by ET.

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With a cash balance of Rs 1,977 crore and an average monthly burn of Rs 17 crore, the Unacademy group will have at least 116 months of runway, according to screenshots of an internal presentation made during a company board meeting held on April 14 that Munjal shared with the employees.The projections made by the company were only for April and not for the full year.

The SoftBank- and General Atlantic-backed startup has been cutting its workforce for a year via multiple rounds of layoffs. In November 2022, Munjal had said in a Twitter post that the company had cut its cash burn from $20 million a month to $7 million, with a further reduction on the cards.

Among other recent experiments, the edtech unicorn had launched offline learning with Unacademy Centres in May 2022, as the demand for online education dropped with the lifting of Covid restrictions. In 2020, Unacademy had begun testing Graphy to help creators grow their audience, monetise skills and host live cohort-based courses.

The company had also taken a stab in the K-12 space. But in 2022, Unacademy said it would move away from the K-12 segment and shut down subsidiaries Mastree and Swiflearn which it had acquired between 2020 and 2021, to balance costs.