India's Unacademy raises $11.5m Series B round
Sequoia Capital India and SAIF Partners have led a $11.5 million Series B funding round for Indian free-to-use learning platform operator Unacademy.
Existing backers Blume Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated. The capital will be used to scale up the company’s technology and design team as well as produce new content and expand services into new education categories.
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. It has about 50,000 lessons online and more than one million subscribers on YouTube.
“Unacademy democratizes access to personalized learning by connecting educators and students directly on its platform,” Alok Goel, a managing director at SAIF, said in a statement. “We believe it has the potential to disrupt the status quo that limits access to quality education at a global level. With very limited investment, the team has built a strong brand and word-of-mouth reputation.”
The company plans to establish and operate a global education product from India in part by expanding its services into categories including personality development, new languages and job interviews. It expects to grow tenfold in 18 months by connecting its platform with more than 10,000 educators internationally.
Blume and Nexus led a INR300 million ($4.7 million) Series A round for the company earlier this year. It followed seed funding led by Blume last year, including an initial $500,000 round plus a $1 million follow-up investment.
India's online education industry will be worth $40 billion this year, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation. The market is said to be the largest globally at kindergarten-to-high school level, with more than 250 million new enrollments per year.
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