upGrad Appoints Mukesh Mundra as Chief Financial Officer

Mundra joined the company founded by Ronnie Screwvala after working at JioStar as finance head. Before that, he spent more than eight years as CFO at Viacom18, where he handled financial planning and business transformation.

He is a chartered accountant and CFA with more than 26 years of experience across industries such as media, telecom, manufacturing, and consumer businesses.

Earlier in his career, Mundra worked at Idea Cellular, where he helped with the Spice Communications deal and the creation of the Indus Towers joint venture. He also held roles at Grasim Industries and Anand Rathi Group.

At upGrad, he will oversee finance and administration, including financial planning, governance, business support, and scaling operations.

Mukesh Mundra said, “upGrad is at an exciting stage of growth as it continues to shape the future of lifelong learning and workforce development. The opportunity to build financially resilient and scalable systems while supporting innovation and business transformation is incredibly exciting. I look forward to partnering with the leadership team to further strengthen operational excellence and drive sustainable growth globally.”

Ronnie Screwvala, Co-founder and Chairperson at upGrad, added,
“Mukesh’s deep financial expertise and strong experience across large-scale consumer businesses make him a valuable addition to upGrad’s leadership team. His strategic understanding of finance, governance and business transformation will play a critical role as we continue scaling our global operations and strengthening our longterm growth roadmap.”

upGrad is currently waiting for approval from the Competition Commission of India for its planned acquisition of Unacademy. The all-stock deal is valued at around ₹2,055 crore (about $218 million), which is much lower than Unacademy’s peak valuation of $3.4 billion in 2021.

upGrad said the acquisition will help the company expand into the online test preparation market and provide more services to its existing users. Unacademy is also expected to have cash reserves of around ₹900–950 crore when the deal is completed.

The company believes this acquisition, along with other mergers, will support its future growth. The Unacademy deal alone could add nearly ₹500 crore to upGrad’s total revenue.

Before the acquisition, upGrad reportedly became profitable during the first 11 months of FY26, earning a profit of ₹38 crore on provisional and unaudited revenue of ₹1,532 crore.

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