Unacademy opens tuition centres like BYJU's as edtech space shrinks

Bengaluru, May 18

As online education space shrinks with India reopening amid the 'hybrid normal', learning platform Unacademy on Wednesday announced its foray into opening physical tuition centres across the country, following BYJU's footsteps.

The Unacademy centres will facilitate the offline classes in the NEET UG, IT JEE and Foundation (9-12) course categories.

The first Unacademy centre will be operational in Kota by next month, followed by similar touchpoints in Jaipur, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Patna, Pune and Delhi, the company said in a statement.

"With 'Unacademy Centres' we will bring the best of Unacademy -- India's top Educators, best-in-class technology and product, and state-of-the-art infrastructure -- for our learners," said Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO, Unacademy Group.

The platform aims to enroll up to 15,000 learners in the first batch across centres.

Unacademy said it will soon conduct a national scholarship admission test for batch enrollments where rankers can win scholarships.

The move comes at a time when online education providers are looking to go offline as the edtech industry is struggling to sustain their business model.

After post-Covid tremors at Unacademy and BYJU's-owned WhiteHat Jr, another edtech major Vedantu recently laid off nearly 200 employees.

Edtech platforms are seeing a significant dip in the demand for online learning and some of such firms have either shut shops or fired employees in recent days.

Unacademy recently laid off nearly 600 employees, contractual workers and educators -- about 10 per cent of its 6,000-strong workforce across the group.

WhiteHat Jr has also shut its schools division that last year targeted to take its flagship coding curriculum to 10 lakh school students by the next academic year.

In a nightmare for nearly 1,000 employees, homegrown edtech startup Lido Learning which is backed by top entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala, shut operations in February this year.