Ravi Handa quits Unacademy months after selling his upstart Handa ka Funda to the firm

Ravi Handa

Ravi Handa, the founder of Handa ka Funda, an e-learning platform for CAT and MBA entrance exams that was acquired by Unacademy in 2021, has resigned from the SoftBank-backed edtech unicorn.

Handa, who joined Unacademy as Content Sales Director in April 2021, in a tweet on September 2 said September 1 was his last working day at the firm. Handa, a famous educator in MBA circles, has resigned due to personal reasons, according to sources.

Handa, an IIT Kharagpur graduate, had started his professional career as a math academic at IMS, an MBA coaching institute. Handa taught at IMS for a little over four years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He was then working with SoftBank-backed SaaS (software-as-a-service) HR Training unicorn MindTickle as its Vice President of Customer Success department for almost a year and a half, before he started Handa ka Funda in 2013. The platform claims to have taught over 20,000 students via online courses. In March 2021, it was acquired by Undacademy

Handa's exit from Unacademy follows that of Karan Shroff, Partner and CMO (chief marketing officer) at Unacademy, who also put in his papers on September 1, and thus marks two senior-level exits from the SoftBank-backed unicorn in a span of two days.

The senior-level exits come ahead of the launch of UnacademyOne, a new product that Unacademy will be launching on September 5 in Bengaluru. While further details of UnacademyOne are awaited, the company's employees are extensively promoting it on social media.

The exits also come at a time when the edtech unicorn is aggressively looking to cut costs and is aiming for profitability to preparing for a near-term runway amid a funding crunch.

Moneycontrol had reported exclusively last month, that Unacademy had halved its job guarantee vertical--Relevel's team to about 700 employees amid a global slowdown in the job market.

In July, Unacademy had taken initiatives like pay cuts for founders and management, put travel restrictions on employees and stopped complimentary meals and snacks at their offices.

In the same month, the company had said that it will not exercise any more layoffs and would rather relocate redundant employees to other teams.

In another cost-cutting initiative, Unacademy had suspended contracts of some of its doubt-solving NEET and IIT-JEE educators, Moneycontrol had reported exclusively. Unacademy had told educators that it has made 'strategic changes' to its customised learning solutions and owing to the change it will 'significantly' reduce doubt solving on its platform.