Unacademy, Indian free learning platform, has raised $500,000 in their first round of external investment. The investment round is being led by Blume Ventures along with Rajan Anandan (Google), Sumit Jain (CommonFloor), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Taxi4Sure), Sujeet Kumar (earlier Flipkart), Phanindra Sama (RedBus) among others.
“Unacademy’s vision is to distribute knowledge of the educators and innovators in the form of mini courses having lessons of not more than 10 minutes each. The platform makes the discovery of these courses easy which the learners can then take and track their progress,” said GauravMunjal,Co -founder and CEO, Unacademy.
Unacademy, which started as an educational YouTube channel launched its free learning platform in January 2016. While the YouTube channel has more than 15 million video views making it one of the top educational channels in the country, the platform has more than 1500 lessons ranging from learning a new language to cracking government examinations.
KarthikReddy, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures said, “Unacademy is a manifestation of the team’s vision to make all forms of educative material so intuitive and accessible that learning becomes extremely interesting and scalable. Whether its the brightest kid in class summarising course material for his fellow classmates or someone getting tips for a civil services exam or a first-time traveller to the US getting life tips, these were non-scalable in the past. By fluidly weaving them into the content format that Unacademy has, teaching and learning can be truly democratic - at an unprecedented scale. Delivery of education in India needs radical shifts and Unacademy is a bet to deliver that objective.”
The company allows educators to create courses on the platform. All educators go through an interview process and selection is based on their experience. The company helps educators create these courses which are then available on the platform for free. Unacademy aims to make teaching cool, some people who never thought they would be teaching have created courses on the platform and are loving the response.
Unacademy is founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. Gaurav and Hemesh were previously running Flatchat which was acquired by CommonFloor in 2014. Roman, 24, is a doctor from AIIMS and one of the youngest persons to crack the Civil Services Examination. To follow his passion for building Unacademy, he quit the administrative services from the post of Asst. Collector of Jabalpur to start Unacademy.
