India's Unacademy raises $4.4m Series A round
Blume Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners have led a INR300 million ($4.4 million) Series A round of funding for Indian free-to-use learning platform operator Unacademy.
According to a statement, Stanford Angels, Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk and Ananth Narayanan, CEO of Myntra, also participated. It follows seed funding led by Blume last year, including an initial $500,000 round plus a $1 million follow-up investment.
The capital will be used to expand the company's content portfolio, hire new educators and improve customer experience. The goal is grow the teaching staff from 200 to 2,000 within a year across varied exam preparation, language learning and professional growth areas.
"The founders are steadfast in their vision of creating an incredible democratization of educational content," said Karthik Reddy, managing partner at Blume. "This round sets the stage for content categories to explode in very interesting directions over the next year or so, and then the world is our playground. We hope to see Unacademy become the first great global consumer success story from India."
Founded in 2015, Unacademy offers free educational videos that aim to help students prepare for competitive examinations and improve their ability to speak and write. The platform aims to offer more flexibility than traditional classrooms and incorporates techniques such as storytelling and mnemonics, a memorization methodology.
The service, which currently includes some 6,000 lessons over 500 courses, is India's top channel on YouTube, with more than 27 million video views and about 375,000 subscribers. An Android app is planned to be launched next month.
India's online education industry will be worth $40 billion this year, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation. The market is estimated to be the largest globally at kindergarten-to-high school level, with more than 250 million new enrollments per year.
Recent venture activity in this space includes a $50 million round for mobile-based test preparation program Byju's by Sequoia Capital and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Meanwhile, InnoVen Capital has supported an overseas expansion effort for Simplilearn, an educational technology start-up previously backed by Mayfield, Kalaari Capital and Helion Venture Partners.
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