One of India’s leading online learning platform Unacademy has raised $110 million in a new round of funding from General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital and Facebook, the company has announced recently.
The Series E round also saw participation from its existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital and Blume Ventures. Angel investors Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of FLipkart, and Sujeet Kumar, Co-founder of Udaan, also participated in the round.
Announcing the news, excited Gaurav Munjal, Co-founder and CEO of Unacademy, took to Twitter and wrote:
“Happy to announce that Unacademy has raised $110M in a new round of funding from General Atlantic, Sequoia and Facebook with participation from existing investors Nexus, Steadview and Blume.”
Taking the opportunity, the co-founder also explained about the company, its mission and goal under the same tweet writing,
“Our mission from day one has been to make high quality education affordable and accessible to everyone. There are more than 800 educators who teach live on Unacademy everyday with hundreds of thousands of learners attending these classes from their smartphones. We have also heavily invested in making high quality free classes available on YouTube and our own platform where we see more than 150M video views every month. Our goal is to not just become the largest education organization but to be the biggest consumer internet organization in India.”
Founded in 2010 by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh, Unacademy offers educational videos and live interactive classes in multiple languages. It provides a wide range of online lessons and specialized courses helping students crack various competitive examinations, improve their ability to speak, write better and increase their knowledge. Unacademy aims to partner with the brightest minds and have courses on every possible topic in multiple languages so the whole world can benefit from these courses. The startup claims to currently have more than 10,000 registered educators and 13 million learners, with 70% of its users from tier 2 and 3 cities, on its platform.
The Bengaluru-based startup plans to utilize the fresh capital to launch more test prep categories, onboard more top educators, and build its content to make it the best available in the industry.
Commenting on the investment, Ajit Mohan, Vice President and Managing Director, Facebook India, said in a statement:
“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 democratizing education and driving innovation in new learning models.”
Unacademy has last year launched a subscription service for learners across the country to access live classes for various examinations. The startup said it now has more than 90,000 active subscribers. Its CEO Gaurav Munjal recently tweeted that the service has today become a $30 million ARR business.
Meanwhile, prior to this round, Unacademy has raised a total of $88.6 million from investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Sequoia India, Blume Ventures, and Steadview Capital among others.
