Education technology company Unacademy said on Wednesday that it has raised $110 million in a Series E funding round led by new investors Facebook and General Atlantic, along with Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital and Blume Ventures. Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart and Sujeet Kumar, co-founder, Udaan also participated in the latest funding round.
The Bengaluru-based firm will utilise the funds to ramp up its test preparation and examination categories, acquiring more educators, and create new learning content and product. With this fresh round of funding Unacademy also provided exits to some of its angel investors, the company said.
“Our goal from day one has been to democratise education and make quality education accessible to everyone. We do that by bringing the best educators and content on our platform and ensuring it is accessible to everyone across the country. We are seeing great learning outcomes through our subscription where learners can take live classes by these educators,” said Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO, Unacademy.
“We now have more than 90,000 active subscribers. Our goal is to democratise education and become not just the largest educational organisation but the largest consumer internet story out of India,” Munjal added.
Unacademy started as a YouTube channel in 2010 when Munjal, then an engineering student, started uploading tutorials. Soon, he asked his friend Roman Saini, an MBBS from AIIMS who had cracked the civil services, to upload tutorials for IAS aspirants. Hemesh Singh joined some days later as the CTO of the online education platform, which brings together educators and students.
The platform provides educational videos and live interactive classes with access to more than 30 exam categories for learners. Unacademy currently has more than one million videos on its platform. Today, the platform has over 10,000 educators who have created educational videos.
In 2019, Unacademy launched its subscription for various examinations. The company claims it has more than 90,000 active subscribers. About 70% of its users are from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. More than 700 educators take classes on its platform every day, the company said.
“Facebook is an ally for India’s economic growth and social development, and we are excited about India and its rapidly rising Internet ecosystem. With this investment in Unacademy, we are reinforcing our commitment to the Indian startup ecosystem as well as investing in a company that is transforming learning in India. We love that the company is fundamentally democratising education and driving innovation in new learning models,” said Ajit Mohan, vice president and managing director, Facebook India, in a statement.
Last week Bengaluru-based interactive online tutoring platform Vedantu raised $24 million funding led by global venture capital firm GGV Capital. Vedantu, known for its K-12 interactive online tutoring, said that it has more than 25 million users every month across 1,000 cities and over 40 countries accessing its learning content and videos on its platform and channels on YouTube.
In January this year larger rival Byju’s raised $200 million from New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management. Analysts said Byju’s latest funding round took its valuation to about $8 billion. The Bengaluru-based education-technology company has over 42 million registered users and 3 million paid subscribers.