Unacademy : India’s Online Learning Platform Helping People To Move a Step Forward Towards Their Dream
Almost all the students of our country are pressurized for signing up in coaching classes after the secondary examination. But life becomes hectic after long hours in school followed by coaching and then self-study. This is the reason why students lose interest and tend to give up. Moreover, even in coaching classes, the lectures are equivalent to long hours of speech and every doubt of students is not solved.
So here, Unacademy comes to the rescue. Unacademy brings to India an online learning platform, where you can get to watch online videos of your curriculum prepared by experienced educators. The app is not only useful for 10+2 students but also for the college students preparing for exams like CAT, GATE, UPSC, etc.
History
Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, launched Unacademy.in, a Bangalore based start-up, in January 2016. The organisation is run by Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd. Before launching this free learning platform, Unacademy used to be an educational youtube channel, started in 2010, which now has around 15 million video views. The channel was created and run by Gaurav Munjal, and then later in 2015, the other two members joined in.
Munjal and Singh before launching Unacademy, worked at Flatchat which came under the acquisition of CommonFloor in 2014. Saini was one of the civil service aspirants, who cracked the examination at a very young age, but he left his job as Assistant Collector, in order to build Unacademy. At the age of 22, Saini became an IAS Officer by ranking 18th in the civil service examination 2013. He realized that among 6.5 lakhs IAS aspirants, only 1.5 lakhs were able to afford coaching classes. So, he decided to join Munjal in the platform of Unacademy and give online coaching to help the underprivileged students.
Growth and Investors
Only after a year of launching the free app, Unacademy raised a good amount of funding. In 2016, the company raised $500,000 in the seed round of funding hosted by Blume Ventures. Some of the investors who participated in this funding round were Rajan Anandan (Google India Head), Sumit Jain (Co-founder of CommonFloor), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Co-founder of Taxi4Sure), Sujeet Kumar and Phanindra Sama (Co-founder of redBus). Flipkart’s co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal and Paytm’s founder Vijay Sekhar Sharma also funded $1 million to Unacademy. By this time, Unacademy already gained more than 200,000 subscribers and 729 videos from online coaches. The videos were short (around 8-10 minutes) and crisp with a lot of visuals like graphs and images to make sure that the students don’t lose interest.
In 9th August 2017, Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and founder of Directi (an online application for business and communication) joined the board as Director. Turakhia is a huge tech entrepreneur who apart from founding Directi also founded Flock, Radix, CodeChef, Ringo, Media.net (co-founder) and Zeta (co-founder). According to the estimates of Forbes magazine in 2017, he was ranked as 95th richest person of India. He looks upon the overall business strategy of Unacademy and focuses on creating more versatile contents.
In 2017, the company raised $11.5 million in series B funding, from Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. The company announced that the funds will be invested in hiring new employees and for increasing the number of products. The company was hiring online educators on the basis of their experience and the educational background.
The three founders got featured in ‘Forbes 30 Under 30 India’ for their commendable work and progress. In July 2018, the organisation raised $21 million funds through another round of funding, Sequoia India, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners being the main investors. The company has raised a total of $38.6 million through all the funding rounds so far.
The success
With the increasing number of active students and teachers, Unacademy has become India’s largest online learning platform. There are over 2,400 lessons in Unacademy, covering topics from the various competitive exams. With more than 2 million views on the videos, Unacademy is reaching every corner of India to help the youth and empower them. Unacademy also has some top ideal educators, like Kiran Bedi, on board. More than 300,000 students have been benefited from the free app and have cracked even the toughest competitive exams of India.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more