The Indian ed-tech boom, that gathered massive steam due to COVID-19 induced nationwide lockdowns, is showing no signs of slowing down. Following the footsteps set by the largest player in the game Byju’s, Unacademy, another one of India’s largest ed-tech companies, has raised $440Mn at a massive valuation of $3.44Bn.
The Series H round was led by Temasek, with super pro-rata participation from General Atlantic, Tiger Global, and Softbank Vision Fund. Moreover, others like Aroa Ventures, the family office of OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal, and Deepinder Goyal, Co-Founder and CEO at Zomato also participated in the round.
This comes after a funding round earlier this year in January, when the company had raised money from Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadview Capital and General Atlantic.
The edtech industry has been booming ever since the pandemic first surfaced, thanks to physical in-person learning still not available in a large part of the country. Thus, companies like Byju’s and Unacademy picked up the slack, allowing students to continue their learning journey despite unforeseeable circumstances. This has led to a massive growth in traffic, as well as some heated competition.
Major players have been raising capital and making acquisitions left and right, and Unacademy is no different. Recently, the company had acquired Live Game Streaming platform Rheo TV, just a few months after its deal with Handa ka Funda, a digital learning platform for CAT and MBA aspirants.
However, none of these expenses are unwarranted, as Unacademy’s valuation has risen by almost 10X over the last 18 months (one of the fastest growth rates witnessed by a mid-stage consumer internet startup in India.) It already has over 50,000 educators, teaching over 62 millions students and provides its services in 14 languages to learners across 5,000 cities.
While this sudden growth is definitely good, it is not cheap. With such massive user influx comes the pressure to keep improving, and thus, it is no surprise that Unacademy has been on a capital raising spree ever since the pandemic started. Nonetheless, with this new capital, it will stand a better chance against its competitors like Byju’s, Vedantu and others, most of which have also been growing at a stupendous rate.
