Unacademy's Graphy buys Gaurav Munjal-backed creator community platform Scenes

Unacademy's Graphy buys Gaurav Munjal-backed Scenes

Unacademy's Graphy, a SaaS (software-as-a-service)-based platform for content creators, has bought Scenes, a community platform for creators, marking the first acquisition for the SoftBank-backed edtech unicorn in 2023.

Graphy's co-founder and CEO Sumit Jain announced the acquisition of Scenes in a late evening tweet on June 21. Jain did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. A query sent to Unacademy's co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal, remained unanswered.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-theme="dark"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Super excited to announce that Graphy has acquired Scenes. Scenes has built a great community platform for creators. As <a href="https://twitter.com/graphyapp?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@graphyapp</a> continues to expand worldwide, the <a href="https://twitter.com/buildonscenes?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@buildonscenes</a> product and offerings will supercharge our efforts and solidify our position as leaders in the…</p>&mdash; Sumit Jain (@sumjain) <a href="https://twitter.com/sumjain/status/1671534829098217473?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 21, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Founded in 2021 by Varun Mayya, Abhinav Arora, and Shashank Udupa, Scenes runs a community management platform for brands. The acquisition will "solidify" Graphy's pole position in the creator economy, Jain said in the tweet.

Scenes has raised about $50,000 in Seed round. Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO is an investor in Scenes. Besides Munjal, Scenes counts Kunal Shah, Blume Ventures (also and investor in Unacademy), Better Capital, Tanmay Bhat and Flipkart's Kalyan Krishnamurthy as its backers. Scenes has a holding entity in Singapore called Avalonmeta Ventures Pte.

Graphy's move to buy Scenes comes a few months after Jain announced it turning operationally profitable for the month of December. Graphy had a revenue of about Rs 18 crore in the calendar year 2022, Munjal had told his team in May in a Slack message. Unacademy predicted it to grow to Rs 30 crore in 2023. In the same message, he had said, "Graphy is turning out to be a phenomenal tech business with amazing unit economics."

In November, Munjal had also taken a dig at the valuation of Classplus, a competitor of Graphy. He had said Classplus was overvalued, citing the growth of Graphy. Classplus is valued at about $500 million and had a revenue of Rs 45.4 crore for FY22 (2021-22).

Launched in 2018 by co-founders Jain, Sushil Kumar, and Shobhit Bakliwal, Graphy is a SaaS-based platform under Unacademy's group companies for creators to grow their audience, monetize their skills, and host live sessions and cohort-based courses.

The acquisition marks the first buy for Unacademy since the SoftBank-backed edtech unicorn bought Gate Academy in September last year. Unacademy has also been dealing with a host of issues over the past year as schools, colleges and physical tuition centers have reopened, leading to a fall in demand for online learning. The company has seen growth in its core business flattening and has taken a number of cost-cutting initiatives including close to 2,000 layoffs.