The (former) Viennese unicorn GoStudent, an online learning platform, has presented its balance sheet for 2022 with a loss of almost €221 million and a revenue of €52 million. At the beginning of 2022, GoStudent secured €300 million in a Serius D round with a €3-billion valuation. Three takeovers and US expansion followed this. The company laid off hundreds of employees and failed to turn profitable in 2023. The future does not seem to be too bright for GoStudent.
Nothing is currently known about GoStudent‘s current valuation, but it seems very unlikely that it will exceed one million euros given the exploding losses and the rather modest turnover. This would mean that the start-up would have lost its unicorn status.
But why were these massive staff cuts necessary when a record investment had just been made? The balance sheet and profit and loss account for 2022, which GoStudent published a few months too late, provide some clues to answer this question. According to this, GoStudent recorded a loss of exactly 220,883,038.38 euros in that year. Therefore, a significant portion of the investment was used up in the same year.
Personnel expenses are of course a relevant individual item, but not the largest. Unicorn spent almost 34 million euros in 2022, including all employee benefits. The largest single item is the unspecified “other operating expenses,” which are around €97 million. The “Expenses from financial assets and securities” are also significant at more than €41 million.
With a negative gross result of around €47 million and a few smaller individual items, the final result is around minus €221 million for 2022. With a loss carried forward from the previous year of around €93 million, GoStudent ultimately had a net loss of around €314 million at the end of 2022.
GoStudent founder Felix Ohswald announced in March 2023 that he wanted to achieve profitability by the end of the year. At the time, he said the company was already profitable in its core market. However, Ohswald and co-founder Gregor Müller admitted in January 2024 that this plan did not actually succeed. The start-up withdrew further capital. It doesn’t look good for the future of the former unicorn, it seems.
