Unacademy, a leading online education platform from India, has raised $11.5 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital India and SAIF Partners. Along with them, their existing investors, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures, also participated in the round.
Unacademy will use the newly acquired funds in improving their technology and overall quality of their product. They are aiming to migrate to new categories like personality development, job interviews and new languages. Their prime focus is going to be on generating in-house content. It is planning to expand its reach globally by 10,000 more educators to its platform in a period of 18 months.
Till now, the Bengaluru based startup has rasied $17.5 million across four funding rounds. Sequoia has been an active investor in the Edtech sector. It is Sequoia’s third investment in the past two years. Previously, it invested in mathematics learning platform Cuemath and Byju’s.
Unacademy was founded by Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. It lets educators create various courses through their app. To maintain the quality of content they provide, all the educators need to go through a screening process based on their experience and skills. Currently, it offers over 50,000 online lessons across various genres.
Unacademy, started off as an educational Youtube channel in 2011, has over 1 million registered users and over 4000 educators. It’s educators range from teachers across small towns and cities to some influential personalities like Kiran Bedi. One of the best aspects of Unacademy is that they let students and educators directly on their platform.
In early 2017, Unacademy raised $4.5 million dollars in Series A rounding from Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures. In 2016, it raised $1 million from Blume Ventures, PayTm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.
Online Education market, which now stands at $247 million is expected to touch $1.96 billion by the year 2021.