Unacademy shuts Mastree after a year of acquisition

Ed-tech firm Unacademy has shut down Mastree a year after acquiring a majority stake in the startup, an internal note by chief executive Gaurav Munjal to his leadership team showed.

Unacademy had invested $5 million in Mastree in July last year as it wanted to strengthen its presence in the K-12 learning space. Mastree was building a subscription product for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) courses for students in grades 5-8.

"Everyone - after a lot of experiments we have decided to shut down the operations at Mastree. Kudos to Shrey (Goyal) and Royal (Jain) for iterating at breakneck speed and trying out many things before all of us decided to shut things down," the internal note said. ET has seen a copy of the note.


Both Goyal and Jain, who co-founded Mastree in October 2019, will leave the ed-tech firm by end of the month, according to Munjal's note.

"I am sure that this is the start of their entrepreneurial journey, and they'll create many more companies and products," Munjal added.

Most of Mastree's employees have been retained in other businesses of the Unacademy Group, according to the note.

At present, it has 240 people, of which 190 are likely to be absorbed by Unacademy, according to news portal Entrackr, which was the first to report the development.

A spokesperson for Unacademy declined to comment.

Unacademy has made around seven acquisitions so far.

In February, it acquired TapChief for a valuation of ₹100 crore.

TapChief is an online platform for professionals to earn incomes without full-time jobs.

Last month, Unacademy raised $440 million in a new funding round led by Singapore's Temasek, which valued it at $3.4 billion.

South Korea's Mirae Asset had also joined the funding round.