Blog
Vaibhav Srivastava 
2 September 2020Unacademy, one of the leading online learning platform in India raised $150 million in the latest round of funding taking its valuation to $1.45 billion. Companies which invested in Unacademy include SoftBank Group Corp., Sequoia Capital and Facebook Inc. The recent funding has tripled its valuation from $510 million to $150 million.
This Guarav Munjal-led firm is not the only company to achieve this feat. Previously, BYJU’s, another edtech startup was valued more than $1 billion to become a part of coveted unicorn club.
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The investment came at a time when online education is at its all-time high amid more than two months country-wide lockdown. The rising Covid-19 cases have become a matter of concern for the authorities and due to this, the schools and college institutions across the country have remained closed for 5 plus months now. With no better option left, students have turned towards online learning platforms to compensate for the loss in their studies.
So far, the year 2020 has proved remarkable for Unacademy. The company has acquired three notable startups, Mastree, CodeChef and PrepLadder in just a span of three to four months. Other than that, it has recently launched a new product, known as Graphy.
The online education is flourishing exceptionally in India. In 2020 alone, BYJU’s has raised $545 million. Next in the queue is Unacademy which bagged $260 million in two rounds of funding. Other counterparts, Vedantu and Topps have also successfully managed to raise $100 million and $50 million respectively.
Sharing the achievement on Twitter, one of Unacademy’s co-founders, Gaurav Munjal said, “In a young country where only privileged urban Indians with a lot of money could reach exam prep experts, Unacademy has democratized knowledge.”
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Currently, Unacademy has over 30 million registered users and out of them 350,000 are paid subscribers. This startup has grown its user base to up to four times and achieved these figures in just 6 months. Also, it has 18,000+ registered educators specialising in different fields and sectors.
Unacademy was co-founded by Hemesh Singh, Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, a former IAS officer who got it registered in the year 2015. Munjal started offering online Java coding classes on YouTube as a hobby when he was pursuing his engineering degree. Later, he becomes one of the most followed personalities on Quora for answering computer science-related question. He had previously founded and sold two startups before he founded Unacademy.
