To Grow Its Online Learning Platform, Indian-Based Unacademy Calls For $50 Million Investment

Money keeps flowing in the growing education market of India. Unacademy from Bangalore, which runs an online learning platform to assist millions in preparing for the country’s competitive exams, has called for an investment of $50 million.

Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Sequoia India, and Blume Ventures led the Series D financing. Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, the two co-founders of the platform also participated. The new round indicates that to date, the startup has successfully raised around $90 million.

The four-year-old startup targets students preparing for the college entrance exam as well as those striving for graduation-level courses. With Unacademy, students can watch educators’ live classes and join sessions to detailedly review topics. Compared to 3 million learners from a year ago, the platform now has 13 million learners and 10,000 registered educators.

According to the startup, the new fund will be used to raise the number of educators on the platform, to include more exam courses, to expand the team and improve its product.

The journey of Unacademy begins with a YouTube channel. After that, it has created its own app with which it offers free courses as well as a subscription service called Unacademy Plus Subscription.

Unacademy keeps an archive that has all the classes. Therefore, students can go back to old courses for references at any time. YouTube, as stated by the startup, is still the platform’s largest distribution. Overall, the platform has over 100 mil monthly views.

Munjal said:

Unacademy’s rival is unicorn Byju’s. With a valuation of about $4 billion, Byju’s is said to be the world’s largest edtech startup. The app has over 2.4 mil paid subscribers and more than 30 mil users. Courses are offered for students from kindergarten to grade 12, as well as those preparing for graduate level courses.