Unacademy, Indian free online learning platform, has raised additional $1 million in their second round of external investment. In April 2016, they raised their first round of funding worth $500k. The current investment round is being led by Blume Ventures, along with Stanford Angels India, WaterBridge Ventures, Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Kunal Shah, Sandeep Tandon, Ashish Tulsian, Tracxn Labs and most of their existing investors participating in the round.
Unacademy is India’s largest free online learning platform that allows educators to create courses using their app on various subjects, including exclusive content for various competitive exams. Their vision is to get the best minds of the country share their knowledge in an easily comprehendible form. More than 100 educators have created 200+ courses in the last eight months since the launch of their platform Unacademy.in. The platform attracts more than 1M video views monthly now, their growth so far has been mostly organic.
“What started as an experiment has today become one of the most reliable sources of online education. From content specific to competitive examinations to basic English learning techniques, we are in a process to make Unacademy the one-stop destination for online courses across myriad fields and subjects. From IAS topper 2016, Tina Dabi, to India’s first woman IPS officer, Kiran Bedi, we aim to get courses from only the best on our platform. Within two months, the Unacademy Create app will be made available to all, so anyone across the world can create lessons in any language they like. After a thorough screening process, we will make the relevant lessons available on our platform that will be free for all to see,” says Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO, Unacademy.
In a span of eight months, over 300,000 students have benefited from over 2,400 online lessons and specialised courses on cracking various competitive examinations, on our platform. Our success stories include thousands of students who have cracked toughest of examinations, improved their ability to speak and write better and increase their knowledge. Some of our students have today become educators on Unacademy and that is what we call a true educational revolution. India is home to 19 per cent of the world’s youth and we are empowering them to take on the world in a manner that classrooms will never do. Our vision is to partner with the brightest minds and have courses on every possible topic in multiple languages so that the whole world can benefit from these courses.
Karthik Reddy,Managing Partner, Blume Ventures, says, “Unacademy presents a great example of the beginnings of an incredible shift in India’s Internet—the ability of millions of new internet users using smartphones as their only access device to create and consume high quality curated educational content as easily as laying hands on a textbook. And the product is designed for both lightweight production and consumption—in that it’s ingenious. This can change learning to an entirely different plane and kill a lot of ineffective institutional frameworks. And it’s an absolutely crack team of young founders for whom all else, including the IAS, didn’t compare to the ambitiou” goal and impact that an Unacademy can have. This is why we think tech can be such a game changer even in education in this country.”
Sachin Bansal, Executive Chairman, Flipkart, says, ”Education and learning from the best suited teachers and professionals is a global problem, which, I believe, Unacademy solves seamlessly with its interactive and intuitive content. In a short span of eight months, the founding team has proved that leveraging technology to empower its educators and students is a problem that can be solved effectively at scale. I am impressed by the ease with which educators can speedily upload videos and touch a billion lives with effective lessons. I am confident that the strong founding team of Unacademy is well positioned to truly disrupt traditional classroom teaching with more impactful content, and I am proud to back the venture.”
Kiran Bedi, Lt Governor, Puducherry, and also an educator at Unacademy, says, “ It took me ten minutes to make a video lesson on ’Time management and productivity’ on the Unacademy Create app, and impact a million lives with my learning. The overwhelming response from students, along with the simplicity with which the app has been designed, encourages working professionals to share their experience. It is an unconventional way for students to get the perspective of real life challenges and lessons and makes me believe everyone can be a teacher. I urge Unacademy to conduct lessons and workshops in Puducherry. Unacademy cuts across boundaries. It’s truly global and in one’s own hands.”
