Online business school Stoa will cease its operations as the number of working professionals showing interest in the six-month MBA program post-pandemic sank.
Questo Wellbeing Pvt Ltd, which operates the platform, will be "closing the doors" after four years of operations, Stoa School co-founder Raj Kunkolienkar said on social media, noting that the traction for its courses had "dipped".
“For us to stay true to our original mission of bringing affordable business education to the millions, staying online was key. Post pandemic, there was a perceptible dip in the interest for online live-learning due to changing consumer preferences,” Kunkolienkar said.
The decision comes three years after the online school, in October 2021, secured $1.5 million from the founders of Zerodha, Cred, Udemy, Myntra, and Zivame, among others.
The company, which claimed to offer an “alternative to the traditional MBA”, provided a six-month long part-time program called StoaMBA to working professionals who aspired to join business management roles at a fraction of the cost of a conventional MBA program. The courses were not approved by the University Grants Commission, the country's top authority for higher education.
“Despite having built a strong brand, we decided against going offline because the economics of that move would lead us to a place we stood against,” Kunkolienkar added.
The company was founded in 2020 by Aditya Kulkarni, Raj Kunkolienkar, Manoj Kambadur and Sharmad Kuvelkar. Stoa's LinkedIn page showed more than 4,000 alumni who enrolled in the company's flagship online programs.