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Edutech ventures are seeing increased interest from venture capitalists as Indians’ penchant to invest in education continues to increase.
Unacademy, an online learning platform which helps educators create courses on a variety of subjects, has raised $11.5 million in a funding round led by Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. The Series B round of funding also included existing investors and angel investors such as Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures.
The platform claims to have 50,00 lessons online, 1 million registered users and another million subscribers on YouTube.
With this fund raise, Unacademy aims to onboard 10,000 more educators to its platform in the next 18 months and scale to other categories, including personality development, new languages and job interviews. Further, it will hire people in engineering, design and content.
“We will also significantly invest in producing our own knowledge-based content with the top educators on the platform,” said Gaurav Munjal, CEO and co-founder, Unacademy.
The firm, founded by Munjal, along with Roman Saini Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta, in January raised a Series A funding of $4.5 million in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures, Stanford Angels, and others in the industry such as Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshdesk, and Ananth Narayanan, CEO, Myntra.
Unacademy is one among the many companies as well as investors who see edutech as a kind of new gold rush. Competitor BYJU’s has around four lakh paid customers across K-12 and JEE, NEET, CAT, IAS, GRE and GMAT. Investors have queued up and pumped in excess of $100 million in BYJU’s. Simialrly, Vedantu has received $5 million in funding till date.
“We are working on using facial recognition technologies, verbal affirmation (words like ‘got it’, ‘understood’) which is then followed up with an app store-like rating system where teachers and students can be ranked,” said Vamsi Krishna, co-founder, Vedantu.
Alok Goel, Managing Director, SAIF Partners, believes a business model such as Unacademy’s has the potential to disrupt the education marketplace.
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