Online learning startup Unacademy raises $4.5M in Series A funding

Unacademy, a Bangalore-based online learning startup, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners and existing investor Blume Ventures. With the new round of funding, the startup plans to aggressively invest in growing its educators base from 200 to 2000 in the next one year, across varied exam preparation, language learning and professional growth topics. The one-year-old startup allows educators to create courses using their app on various subjects, including exclusive content for various competitive exams, which can be accessed by students on their platform. They also claim to be one of the largest educational YouTube channels in India. According to Gaurav Munjal, CEO, Unacademy, since ancient times India has been known as the land of vast knowledge and our teachers have been considered Gurus. The online learning platform 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? With the influx of capital Unacademy aims to empower more educators who come on the platform to create highly engaging courses that impact millions of students. And we have just started, there is a long way to go,” Munjal said.

Co-founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sachin Gupta in 2015, Unacademy claims that its platform currently has more than 500,000 registered users with over 200,000 active users. Also, it plans to move beyond courses which cater to major competitive examinations, to content from areas such as personal finance, personality development and more. “We are strong believers in Unacademy’s platform-centric approach to building an engaged community of educators and learners. We feel that they are well-positioned to re-define and democratize learning using vernacular video-led courses for professional development, competitive exams and personal enrichment,” said Sameer Brij Verma, Director, Nexus Venture Partners, who is joining the company’s board.

“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 monetize their knowledge. We are very excited on partnering with Gaurav, Roman, Hemesh, Sachin and the rest of the Unacademy team on the next phase of their entrepreneurial journey,” he added.

“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,” said Karthik Reddy, Managing Director, Blume Ventures.

“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,” Reddy added.