Building on its growth in the first year of its inception,
Unacademy - India’s largest free online learning platform – has raised $4.5 million (Rs 30 crores) in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners and existing investor Blume Ventures.
The one year old startup founded in Bengaluru, allows educators to create courses using their app on various subjects, including exclusive content for various competitive exams, which can be accessed by students on their platform Unacademy.com.They are also one of the largest educational YouTube channels in India.
The platform, which aims to get the best minds of the country share their knowledge in an easily comprehendible form, currently has more than 500,000 registered users with over 200,000 active users.
Gaurav Munjal, CEO, Unacademy, says “Since ancient times India has been known as the land of vast knowledge and our teachers have been considered Gurus. A teacher is equal to a God, I have heard this from my parents since childhood. Unacademy aims to be the largest platform in the world where teachers or educators come and share their knowledge. Our teachers apply various innovative approaches from storytelling to mnemonics to make students understand a topic. And more importantly we have teachers from a lot of two-tier and three-tier cities and even villages teaching on the platform. Why should knowledge sharing be only done by Professors of Stanford, Harvard or IITs? With the influx of capital Unacademy aims to empower more educators who come on the platform to create highly engaging courses that impact millions of students. And we have just started, there is a long way to go.”
With the new round of funding, Unacademy will aggressively invest in growing its educators base from 200 to 2000 in the next one year, across varied exam preparation, language learning and professional growth topics.
The courses on the platform, which currently cater to major competitive examinations, will soon have content from areas such as personal finance, personality development and more. Currently the platform has more than 6000 lessons spread over 500 courses.
“We are strong believers in Unacademy's platform-centric approach to building an engaged community of educators and learners. We feel that they are well-positioned to re-define and democratise learning using vernacular video-led courses for professional development, competitive exams and personal enrichment.
The team has done a great job in growing a community of committed educators nationally by providing them with easy to use powerful tools to share their knowledge, grow their influence and monetise their knowledge. We are very excited on partnering with Gaurav, Roman, Hemesh, Sachin and the rest of the Unacademy team on the next phase of their entrepreneurial journey!” says Sameer Brij Verma of Nexus who is joining the company’s board.
Unacademy’s impact until now can be credited to its small team of talented professionals, curated educators, and evolving product innovation that has brought down the operational costs to a bare minimum. Taking cue from its history that runs down to its YouTube channel, Unacademy has worked towards building a strong and diverse platform for seamless learning, with ease of access both for the educator and the learner.
“The founders are steadfast in their vision of creating an incredible democratization of educational content. We're glad to see Nexus believe in Gaurav, Roman and team to further fuel this vision. This round sets the stage for content categories to explode in very interesting directions over the next year or so, and then the world is our playground. We hope to see Unacademy become the first great global consumer success story from India.”says Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures.
In August 2016, the company raised additional $1 million in their second round of external investment and secured their first round of funding worth $500k in April 2016.
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