Seven months after raising $50 million in Series-D funding, learning platform Unacademy has raised $110 million in Series-E funding led by two new investors - Facebook and General Atlantic.

The funding round also saw investments from Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital and Blume Ventures. Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart, and Sujeet Kumar, co-founder of Udaan, also participated in this round.

With this, Unacademy’s valuation has doubled to $500 million from $225 million. The edutech start-up will utilise the funding to further penetrate into the test preparation categories, launching more exam categories, acquiring top educators and creating exceptional learning experiences for learners through great content and product. Unacademy also provided exits to some of the angel investors in this round.

“This round is oversubscribed. I wanted to close this round at $100 million but ended up with $110 million,” Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO of Unacademy, told BusinessLine .

“Our goal from day one has been to democratise education and make quality education accessible to everyone. We do that by bringing the best educators and content on our platform and ensuring it is accessible to everyone across the country. We are seeing great learning outcomes through our subscription where learners can take Live classes by these educators. We now have more than 90,000 active subscribers. We thank General Atlantic and Facebook who have joined us in this journey and our existing investors who continue to be a part of the journey by supporting us. Besides wanting to become the largest educational organisation we also want to be the largest consumer internet story out of India,” said Munjal.

Investor interest

The edutech space has been witnessing a lot of investor interest lately. Last week, live online tutoring platform, Vedantu raised the second tranche of $24 million of its Series-C round from global venture capital firm GGV Capital, taking the total amount raised in the round to $66 million. Last month, edutech start-up Byju’s, which turned profitable in fiscal 2019, raised $200 million from Tiger Global Management at a valuation of $8 billion.

“Facebook is an ally for India's economic growth and social development, and we are excited about India and it’s rapidly rising Internet ecosystem. With this investment in Unacademy, we are reinforcing our commitment to the Indian start-up ecosystem as well as investing in a company that is transforming learning in India. We love that the company is fundamentally democratising education and driving innovation in new learning models” said Ajit Mohan, Vice-President and Managing Director, Facebook India.

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