LEAD School
- 🦄Became a unicorn2022
- 📈Peak valuation$1.1 Billion ’22
- 💔Became a Unitard2024
- 💸Last valuation~$737M
How it happened
LEAD (formerly LEAD School) is an Indian edtech company that sells an integrated curriculum, teaching system and software to low- and mid-fee private K-12 schools. Backed by WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures, it hit a $1.1B unicorn valuation in January 2022. As pandemic-era edtech enthusiasm faded and funding dried up, its valuation slipped to roughly $740M and it left the unicorn lists in early 2024, though it has since narrowed losses and steadied its core schools business. Glassdoor reviews from the 2022-23 downturn describe repeated layoff rounds and pervasive job insecurity that many summed up as a hire-and-fire environment, with some saying redundancies were labeled as performance issues rather than cost-cutting.
Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.
Source: TechCrunch / OfficeChai / ION Analytics (school-focused edtech selling an integrated curriculum-and-software system to K-12 schools; reached a $1.1B unicorn valuation in a Jan 2022 Series E led by WestBridge Capital and GSV Ventures; the edtech correction cut its valuation to about $740M, and it was removed from unicorn lists in January 2024)
