Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk and Ananth Narayanan, CEO of Myntra along with Stanford Angels have also participated in the round.
The round comes in roughly five months after the startup raised Rs 6.7 crore in funding from top startup entrepreneurs including Flipkart’s Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, and FreeCharge’s Kunal Shah.
According to Gaurav Munjal, CEO, Unacademy, the fresh cash raised will be used to expand content portfolio, onboard educators on the platform, hire talent to scale up team, and improve user experience by leveraging technology.
“With the influx of capital Unacademy aims to empower more educators who come on the platform to create highly engaging courses that impact millions of students,” said Munjal, adding that in the near future, the company aims to have one million active users on the site, every month, and reach to atleast 20,000 lessons on the platform.
The platform currently has more than 500,000 registered users with over 200,000 active users.
The one-year-old Bengaluru based startup, allows educators to create courses on various subjects, including exclusive content for various competitive exams, which can be accessed by students on their platform. Unacademy also has one of the largest educational YouTube channels in India.
With the new round of funding, Unacademy will invest in growing its educator base from 200 to 2000 in the next one year, across varied exam preparation, language learning and professional growth topics. The courses on the platform, which currently cater to major competitive examinations, will soon have content from areas such as personal finance and personality development, among others.
Currently the platform has more than 6000 lessons spread over 500 courses.
“We feel that they (Unacademy) are well-positioned to re-define and democratise learning using vernacular video-led courses for professional development, competitive exams and personal enrichment. The team has done a great job in growing a community of committed educators, nationally, by providing them with easy-to-use powerful tools to share their knowledge, grow their influence and monetise their knowledge,” said Sameer Brij Verma of Nexus, who is joining the company’s board as a part of the deal.
Unacademy, which was Co-Founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sachin Gupta, has previously raised money from a number of high profile entrepreneurs like Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Kunal Shah and others. The startup also plans to launch its Android App by the end of February, 2017.
“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.” commented, Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner at Blume Ventures.
Source: Economic Times