Unacademy, the online learning platform, has started off the year on an enthusiastic note. The company has today announced that it has raised a whopping $4.5 million in its Series A funding round. The capital infusion was led by Nexus Venture Partners and existing backers Blume Ventures.
This round also saw participation from other high-networth investors, namely Stanford Angels, Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk; and Ananth Narayanan, CEO of Myntra. Prior to this round, the company had secured $1 million in its seed funding round back in August last year. And this had also followed its first $500,000 round of funding, which was added to the coffers last year as well.
Talking about their investment, Sameer Brij Verma of Nexus Venture Partners, who is also joining the company’s board, says,
We are strong believers in Unacademy’s platform-centric approach to building an engaged community of educators and learners. 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.
Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures, who is a third-time participant in the company’s funding, says,
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
As for the fresh capital infusion, the company aims to employ the same towards content portfolio expansion, hiring talent to further build out their platform, and improving the user experience. But a major chunk of the funds will be aggressively invested in growing the existing educators base from 200 to 2000 by the end of 2017. These educators will be on-boarded across various categories like language learning, exam preparation, and professional growth topics.
Commenting on the fundraising round, Gaurav Munjal, CEO, Unacademy, says,
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?
Unacademy was founded by Gaurav Munjal, along with Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta in 2015. The primary goal of this free learning tool is to provide quality education to any and all in the country (and soon across the globe). This venture started out as a YouTube channel back in 2010, featuring educational talks by experts in their particular domains. It has now grown beyond the same and allows the educators to create courses on various subjects through their platform.
Over the last one year, Unacademy has witnessed a ten-fold growth and amassed nearly five million views on the educational videos on their platform. It currently has more than 500,000 registered users with over 200,000 active users using their platform. You currently have the option to choose more than 6000 lessons spread over 500 courses.
The company now aims to get the best minds in the country to share their knowledge on their platform in an easily comprehensible form. It also plans to launch their Android app by end of February.
