Unacademy to fill Hemesh Singh’s board seat with Sumit Jain

Unacademy intends to appoint Sumit Jain, a partner at the edtech company, to its board of directors as it looks to fill the seat to be vacated by Co-founder Hemesh Singh, according to a report by The Arc.

The development comes after Singh stepped down last week as the chief technology officer of the edtech firm, transitioning to an advisory role.

Jain, who is also the Co-founder and CEO of Unacademy-owned Graphy—a SaaS platform for creators and educators, was elevated to a partner role in August last year, a position akin to a later-stage co-founder.

A serial entrepreneur, Jain began developing Graphy in April 2020. He had earlier founded real estate portal CommonFloor, which was acquired by Quickr for $200 million in 2016.

Jain has also invested in startups, including Unacademy, as an angel investor.

YourStory has reached out to Unacademy for a comment.

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Meanwhile, Unacademy has undergone several top-level changes, including departures, appointments, and promotions.

Earlier this year, the edtech company promoted Jagnoor Singh to Chief Operating Officer of its offline centres business, following the appointment of Pratik Dalal as Chief Financial Officer of Unacademy centres.

Some notable top-level departures from Unacademy include Arnab Dutta, Senior Vice President; Subramanian Ramachandran, Chief Financial Officer; Vivek Sinha, Chief Operating Officer; and Abhyudaya Rana, Vice President and Chief of Staff at the CTO’s Office.

Amid the wave of top-level departures, Unacademy appointed Sandhydeep Purri as its Chief People Officer.

Last week, Unacademy launched a language learning app, adding another revenue stream. While the Bengaluru-based edtech firm's turnover has increased from its growing offline business, revenue from its core online test preparation segment has declined.

Initially, the app offers to learn Spanish, with plans to add French, German, and Indian languages soon. This move positions Unacademy’s app to compete with global language learning apps like Duolingo and Babbel.

Founded by Munjal, Singh and Roman Saini in 2015, Unacademy claims to have a network of over 91,000 registered educators and more than 99 million learners, offering education in over 14 Indian languages across 10,000 cities.