Unacademy eyes 5th round of funding in 2 years, may raise $35 Mn

Edtech startup Unacademy seems to be unstoppable as the Bengaluru-based firm is eyeing its fifth round of investment in a matter of under twenty-four months. This time Gaurav Munjal-led firm may raise, one of its largest fundings till date, around $30-35 million.

According to a Mint report, existing investors of Unacademy will put in the capital, which is planning to expand its international footprint.

The report also added Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and SAIF Partners could participate in the current round and contribute at least half of the amount to be raised.

Notably, Blume Ventures, Stanford Angels India, WaterBridge Ventures, Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Kunal Shah, Sandeep Tandon, Ashish Tulsian and Tracxn Labs are other investors, who backed Unacademy in earlier rounds.

A brainchild of Munjal, Unacademy started as a YouTube channel back in 2010. Later, it was set-up as a registered entity in 2015. Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sachin Gupta are other co-founders of the company.

So far, the company claims about 1.6 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and counts over 4,000 educators on the platform with a repository of over 50,000 online video lessons.

Unacademy, the platform for educators to create multimedia content for free as well as paid viewing by users, has crossed 1 million downloads. As per video analytics and marketing firm Vidooly, it is at the number three spot among Indian YouTube channels in the education category.

In August last year, Unacademy started pilots in Brazil and Indonesia. It had also launched Unacademy Verified Educators. Like Twitter verified accounts, educators get a verified sign on their profiles, and such educators are also entitled to monetary incentives based on views garnered by their courses.

Till now, it has amassed $17.5 million across four rounds, which includes $11.5 million Series B round led by Sequoia and SAIF in September 2017. Prior to that, the firm had raised $4.5 million Series A financing led by Nexus VP and Blume Ventures.

The funds flow started in April 2016 for Unacademy, when it raised $500k followed by $1 million funding round after four months.