Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Sachin Bansal invests in Edtech Unacademy

Aiming to enhance its product, technology, research and development, and upgrade its hiring, Bangalore-based online learning platform Unacademy has raised additional $1 million funding in the second round of external investment.

The round was led by Blume Ventures, along with Stanford Angels India, and WaterBridge Ventures. However, the main highlight was the marquee angels that included the likes of Sachin Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Binny Bansal, Kunal Shah, Sandeep Tandon and Ashish Tulsian.

The company had earlier raised $500K in the first round of funding in April 2016 from Blume and others.

The round also saw participation from Tracxn Labs and existing investors including Sujeet Kumar (ex-Flipkart), Aprameya Radhakrishnan (TaxiForSure), Phanindra Sama (RedBus), Sumit Jain (CommonFloor) and Vikas Malpani (CommonFloor).

Unacademy was founded by Gaurav Munjal (ex-founder and CEO Flatchat), Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. It was initiated as an educational YouTube channel in 2011.

Gaurav says, “What started as an experiment has today become one of the most reliable sources of online education. Some of our students have today become educators on Unacademy and that is what we call a true educational revolution.”

Unacademy became a free learning platform Unacademy in January 2016. It enables educators to design the perfect courses on various subjects through their app. All educators go through an interview process and selection is based on their experience.

Kiran Bedi, Lt Governor, Puducherry, and also an educator at Unacademy, says, “It took me ten minutes to make a video lesson on ’Time management and productivity’ on the Unacademy Create app, and impact a million lives with my learning. It encourages working professionals to share their experience.”

Unacademy claims that over 300K students have benefited from over 2,400 online lessons and specialised courses in a span of eight months. More than 100 educators have created 200+ courses and with more than one million monthly video views. Also, they have achieved 25 million video views on their educational lessons till date.

It will soon be launching ‘Unacademy Create’ app, which will allow users to access lessons any language. The relevant lessons, after thorough a screening, will then be made available on the platform.

Karthik Reddy, the managing partner of Blume Ventures, said, “It is a great example of the beginning of an incredible shift in India’s Internet. And the product is designed for both lightweight production and consumption—in that it’s ingenious.”

“And it’s an absolutely crack team of young founders for whom all else, including the IAS, didn’t compare to the ambitious goal and impact that an Unacademy can have. This is why we think tech can be such a game changer even for education in this country,” he added.

Sachin Bansal, Executive Chairman, Flipkart, said, “Unacademy is well positioned to truly disrupt traditional classroom teaching with more impactful content, and I am proud to back the venture,

The education market is valued at $1.3 trillion globally and with the EdTech products market valued at $40 billion. India is poised to be the third-largest online market for education, with a plethora of web- and mobile-based courses and tools available in the currently. It is also home to 19 percent of the world’s youth.

Data from venture capital analytics firm Tracxn, however, shows that EdTech has received less than one percent of the venture capital flow into India last year.