Unacademy Raises $21 Million in Series C Funding from Sequoia India, SAIF Partners, Nexus Venture Partners

Unacademy, India’s largest learning platform, announced the closing of its $21 million Series C funding round from Sequoia India, SAIF Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Blume Ventures also participated in this round. Unacademy has raised $38.6 million in total so far.  The funds raised will be utilised to onboard new educators on the platform, penetrate deeper in categories including pre-medical, GATE and CAT, and further strengthen the core product and technology team.

Commenting on the announcement, Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO, Unacademy said, “Right from the outset, we have focused on growing the platform by empowering the best educators. We have grown tremendously since our inception, and just last month, more than 3000 educators were active on the platform and lessons created by them were watched more than 40 million times by learners. I am thankful to our existing investors for infusing Unacademy with growth capital and reaffirming their faith in us. We will utilise these funds to invest heavily in our product and technology to make Unacademy one of the best global internet products out of India. We remain committed to growing our platform with more educators, learners and categories.”

"Sequoia India is thrilled to lead the new round in Unacademy, which is already making a big impact in India’s online learning space.  Gaurav, Roman and Hemesh are driven founders with a very focused mission, and that is having a clear effect on the pace of production innovation, team building and overall growth," said Shailendra Singh, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore.

Unacademy was founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh in 2015. The platform empowers educators by making it easy for them to create high quality educational lessons on the Educator App, that learners access via the Learning App.

In October 2017, Unacademy also launched ‘Plus’ courses on its platform with a private discussion forum, live video classes, and a personalised classroom learning environment with its top educators. Currently, more than 30 educators take paid ‘Plus’ courses on the platform apart from the lessons that are also available for free. Since the launch of Plus courses, the company has achieved a 6x growth in its monthly revenue.

“Unacademy has demonstrated tremendous progress towards their goal of delivering personalized learning by connecting great quality educators and students on their platform. The company has diversified across several new domains and has achieved amazing word of mouth among learners. We are excited to continue supporting Gaurav and team in their journey,” said Alok Goel, Partner, SAIF Partners.

“We are super excited to support the Unacademy team on their mission to become India’s largest online learning platform. The team has done a great job in building market leadership in the government test preparation domain since we led their Series A round in early 2017, and they are aggressively expanding to new examination categories,” said Sameer Brij Verma, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners.