India’s online learning giant Unacademy has acquired Rheo TV, a platform that helps professional game streamers livestream their gameplays and monetize those feeds.
As part of the deal, Unacademy will fully acquire Rheo TV, and enable the exit of all existing investors.
Existing investors of Rheo TV including Lightspeed India Partners, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, AET Fund, Phanindra Sama, founder and former CEO of RedBus, and Mahesh Narayanan, ex-country head of Google Mobile, will exit, it said in a press statement.
Post the acquisition, Rheo TV founders Saksham Keshri and Prakash Kumar will join Relevel — an Unacademy Group company that seeks to revolutionize the Indian job market by enabling job seekers to showcase their skills through tests, and secure employment at some of India’s top companies — as co-founders, the statement added.
Announcing the development in a Tweet, Founder and CEO of Unacademy, Gaurav Munjal, wrote,
Relevel Founding Team getting stronger ???
Unacademy Group has acquired RheoTV and @sakshamkeshri and @Prakashkumar09 will join Relevel as Founders alongside with Co-Founder and CEO @shankmurali ☺️
Saksham and Prakash – Welcome back to Unacademy 🙂
— Gaurav Munjal (@gauravmunjal) July 26, 2021
Rheo TV was launched in August 2019 by two former Unacademy employees Saksham Keshri and Prakash Kumar. They witnessed how content entrepreneurs were generated through various platforms while working at Unacademy and were later motivated to start their own live game streaming platform.
The Bengaluru-headquartered game streaming platform aims to make professional game streaming a mainstream career option in India by building an entertainment ecosystem that drives engagement and monetization. Within a year of launch, the platform clocked more than 5 million users and over 10,000 live streamers, including several college students.
Saksham Keshri also posted in a tweet, “We will be joining Relevel to build a platform that helps job seekers irrespective of their educational background get jobs with the best companies in the world. Coming back to Unacademy feels like coming home”.
The live-game streaming platform has been running well over the past two years, and it has gained a lot of popularity amongst Indian professional live gaming streamers.
The game streaming platform’s founders focused on gaming in the league of cricket and Bollywood in India. Due to the fast internet and low-cost smartphones, India already has roughly 200 million active gamers.
According to Unacademy, it has a network of over 50,000 registered educators and over 62 million learners. The group comprises Unacademy, PrepLadder, CodeChef, Graphy, and Relevel.
The EdTech company is backed by prominent investors such as Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, SoftBank VF2, Facebook, General Atlantic and Sequoia India.
Rheo TV had raised $2 million in January 2020 in a seed funding round from Lightspeed India Partners, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, and several marquee angels.
