Unacademy raises fresh funds at $2 billion valuation
Unacademy, an Indian online educational company based in Bangalore, was founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh in 2015. It was originally created as a YouTube channel in 2010 by Gaurav Munjal and is presently headquartered in Bangalore. The company has a network of over 18,000 educators, and offers preparation material for several professional and educational entrance exams in India. Its lessons are in the form of Live Classes both free and via subscription.
Unacademy strategically overcomes the main obstacles that India faces in its education system by making quality education available and affordable all across India especially in the rural areas in the form of Unacademy Subscription (previously known as Unacademy Plus) which is a paid learning service provided by Unacademy. Many services including study materials for students aspiring for civil services, bank jobs and other competitive exams in India are available. The fact that the grasping and understanding speed of students vary individually has also been looked into by the company as the feature of recorded classes and doubt-solving sessions helps them acquire knowledge on their own speed and comfort level.
The privately-held company, Unacademy, has secured funding through a series of offerings and presently has a total funding of $348.5M and 35 investors. The start-up had previously raised a Series C round of $21 million in July 2018 from Sequoia India, SAIF Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and others. Furthermore, the Learning platform also closed a $50 million Series D funding round from Steadview Capital, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures on June 26, 2019. Recently, the company has also raised an undisclosed amount from Tiger Global at a $ 2M valuation.
"Having a really ambitious iconic goal gives you clarity and makes it easier to focus. We did not go after the small monetisation models because we realised that platform play was a much bigger game to play. On Day 5 of our business, we launched a platform selling tests. Suddenly, it started doing two lakhs a day. We shut it down because we didn’t see it becoming a very large business. And we didn’t want it to distract us from our large audacious goals." said Unacademy co-founder & CEO Gaurav Munjal.
Currently, the company’s valuation is $1.45Bn. it started off as a YouTube channel which is now a community of more than 3 million subscribers and above 250 million views. Now, with its headquarters in Bangalore, Unacademy has over 10,000 registered educators and 13 million learners.
A major setback that Unacademy faced was a huge data breach that involved a Data Leaked of 11 Million Users on the Dark Web in May 2020. Unacademy authorities assured their registered members that nothing sensitive “such as financial data, location or passwords” fell into the wrong hands and stated, “We follow stringent encryption methods using the PBKDF2 algorithm with a SHA256 hash, making it highly implausible for anyone to access the learner passwords. We also follow an OTP based login system that provides an additional layer of security to our learners.”
The competitors in the market like Byju’s, Vedantu, Khan Academy, Toppr have also been expanding at an exceptional rate and are at an advantage due the COVID-19 scenario as they are being approached by students all over India. These service providers share similar business models and share a highly competitive market scenario.
