Unacademy becomes a unicorn by raising $150 million from SoftBank making the total value of the online edutech firm $1.45 billion. Unacademy is an e-learning platform that intends to develop an online information vault for multilingual education. The Bengaluru based online learning platform was established by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh in 2015 focuses on connecting mentors with students across urban areas searching for quality training. The startup claims to have a student base of over 13 million and 400 instructors across 20 test categories including, UPSC, IIT-JEE, and CAT.
The founders of Unacademy understood that YouTube may consistently stay free for all platforms and it may be hard to make a business out of the popularity of the channel. So, they created an application in order to increase the user engagement on their YouTube channel, app, and official website. Thus, making it less complex for the organization to push the subscription-based model to the clients using both the application and the website.
Unacademy becomes a unicorn
Unacademy has brought $150 million up in a series of financing led by Soft Bank making the total value of the ed-tech firm $1.45 billion, the organization said in an announcement. The five-year-old startup, presently a unicorn, raised funds from existing investors namely General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Facebook, and Blume Ventures. It has so far mopped up about $350 million. Unacademy raised $110 million from Facebook, General Atlantic, and a bunch of different investors at a valuation of about $510 million. In June 2019, it had raised $50 million from investors.
The Bengaluru-based organization joins a small bunch of other new businesses in the ed-tech space that has been drawing in significant enthusiasm of late. The Covid-19 pandemic has left the students completely dependent on online classes in order to prepare for their academic as well as competitive exams. A study revealed that about 75% of the guardians want their kids to keep learning through online classes even after school resumes.
“Learning from the best experts to achieve a life goal has mostly been a privilege, available only to those living in the top few cities of the country. At Unacademy, we are breaking that barrier and helping people achieve their life’s most important goals, by giving them access to the best coaching from experts in the field,” said by CEO and Co-founder Gaurav Munjal
In a recent interview, Munjal said the organization’s main objective for the following three years is to grow multiple times from where it is at present. The firm, which has a network of more than 18,000 teachers, takes into account the learning needs of the students in order to be well prepared for 35 competitive exams. Unacademy will utilize the funds raised to launch new products and services.
Once you get a product-market hit, fundraising gets easier and I’ve had tougher fundraising rounds that the one by SoftBank recently. SoftBank has been tracking us for the last 1.5 years and the recent fund-raising round took 45 days to complete. Gaurav Munjal also told that the revenue generated in 2020 is far better than the revenue generated in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
