India's Unacademy secures $50m Series D

Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures also participated, as did Sujeet Kumar, a co-founder of local B2B trading platform Udaan. It comes a year after a $21 million Series C led by Sequoia and including contributions from Nexus, Blume, and SAIF Partners. Other previous backers include Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs, TracxnLabs, and WaterBridge Ventures.

“[W]e were thrilled with how rapidly [co-founder Gaurav Munjal] and team converted some of our collective product brainstorming sessions into an amazing live-streaming product and a subscription business for the test prep market,” Shailendra Singh, a managing director at Sequoia India, said in a statement. “Unacademy is a very meaningful ed-tech company in the making and Sequoia India is excited to invest significantly in this round.”

Founded in 2015, Unacademy offers free educational videos that 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. Last year, it launched a subscription product called Unacademy Plus that now has more than 50,000 users.

Unacademy now claims to be the largest learning platform in India with more than 10,000 registered educators and 13 million student users. The subscription service hosts some 400 educators from across the country per day. This activity includes more than 600 live classes conducted per day covering about 20 exam categories. The company will use the fresh capital to expand into new exam categories, as well as build out its product suite and team.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Expansion
• India
• Sequoia Capital
• Blume Ventures
• Nexus India Capital Advisors
• Education
• TMT