Edtech major Unacademy has halted operations of Mastree, according to two sources close to the development. In July 2020, the unicorn company bought a majority (51 per cent) stake in Mastree for $5 million.
According to one of the sources, Unacademy has reached out to Mastree employees a few weeks back with a list of openings in the company. Then based on their preferences, they were interviewed for new roles at Unacademy. Most of the Mastree employees are said to have been absorbed by Unacademy at higher pay. However, the new roles are not necessarily in the same department that the employees were earlier deployed.
Unacademy did not comment on the development.
Mastree was started in October 2019 by Shrey Goyal and Royal Jain. Currently, Mastree’s website defines the company as an online learning platform for students aged between 5 and 16 years, to help them master English communication skills.
Online learning platform
At the time of acquisition by Unacademy, Mastree was building a one-stop subscription product for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) courses, offering courses for classes 5–8, along with live classes in small groups for mathematics, science, public speaking, creative writing, and vedic mathematics, among others.
Unacademy was founded by Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh, and Roman Saini in 2015. Other than Mastree, Unacademy had acquired Kreatryx, PrepLadder, CodeChef, Tapchief and RheoTV, among others.
Started as a YouTube channel by Gaurav Munjal in 2010, Unacademy has a network of over 50,000 registered educators and over 62 million learners. The company’s content is said to be imparted in 14 Indian languages to learners across 10,000 cities.
Fund-raise
Earlier this month, Unacademy Group raised a fresh round of $440 million funding led by Singapore state-owned Temasek Holdings, valuing the start-up at $3.44 billion. The company is backed by prominent investors such as Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, SoftBank VF2, Facebook, General Atlantic, and Sequoia India.
The development was first reported by Entrackr.