Unacademy secures fresh funding from existing investors

Edtech startup Unacademy has raised fresh funds to the tune of Rs 3.84 crore from existing investors - Sequoia Capital, Saif Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures.

The capital infusion is learned to be extended part of Bengaluru-based startup's Series B round of funding happened in September last year.

This is the fifth round of funding for the Gaurav Munjal led startup. Till now, it has amassed $17.5 million excluding the current round. The company raised $11.5 million Series B round led by Sequoia and SAIF.

Previously, the firm had raised $4.5 million Series A round led by Nexus VP and Blume Ventures.

It also raised a $500K seed round in April 2016 followed by an additional $1 million round in the same year.

The development comes after two months of Unacademy's plan to raise about $35 million from existing as well as new investors to expand its footprint in the international market.

Founded by Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta as an educational YouTube channel – Unacademy claims to have over 1.8 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.

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

Apart from the aforementioned investors, Blume Ventures, Stanford Angels India, WaterBridge Ventures, Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Kunal Shah, Sandeep Tandon, Ashish Tulsian and Tracxn Labs have also backed Unacademy in earlier rounds.

Unacademy competes with the likes of Byju’s Learning, Onlinetyari, Meritnation including several others. Byju's is the biggest player in this space who recently cracked the Unicorn barrier and becomes the only startup from edtech to get such status symbol.

The development was reported by Paper.vc.