Unacademy’s Graphy acquires community-management platform Scenes

According to Graphy, the acquisition will allow it to enhance its offerings as well as expand its reach in the creator ecosystem.

At present, the platform, which was launched by Unacademy in 2020, claims to have helped over 1,00,000 educators and creators launch their online courses.

Founded by Varun Mayya and Shashank Udupa, Scenes is a community management platform that enables creators to manage, moderate, and monetise their community by selling digital products, hosting events, collecting payments, and more.

Backed by the likes of Better Capital, Tanglin Venture Partners, the Blume Founders Fund, and Kunal Shah (of Cred), Scenes also counts Unacademy cofounders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini among the company’s investors.

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“The acquisition of Scenes is a strategic move aimed at strengthening our leadership in the creator economy. We believe in the power of communities and the impact it can have on learner experience. Scenes has built a robust community platform for creators and this acquisition aligns with our vision of helping creators and educators build and scale their online knowledge business’’, said Sumit Jain, CEO, Graphy, who’s also its co-founder along with Sushil Kumar and Shobhit Bakliwal.

Prior to this, Graphy had acquired edtech platform Spayee for $25 million in October 2021. Spayee allowed content creators to produce audio and video tutorials, PDF documents, quizzes, assignments, and live classes

“We’ve partnered with a lot of large creators and businesses over the years. The Scenes product and customers could not have found a better home than Graphy’’, said Varun Mayya, co-founder and CEO, Scenes.

News website Entrackr first reported the acquisition on Wednesday evening.

In November last year, Munjal told employees in an internal memo that Graphy was clocking a monthly gross merchandise value (GMV) of almost Rs 25 crore.

The news of the acquisition comes at a time when the edtech ecosystem is battling slowing growth, financial losses, and mass layoffs as a post-Covid correction sets in.

Earlier this year, Munjal told employees that the firm was cutting 12% of its workforce in another round of layoffs. The edtech company has slashed its headcount over multiple rounds for more than a year now to turn profitable.