Education technology platform Unacademy has raised $500,000 led by Blume Ventures along with a clutch of angels including Google’s Rajan Anandan, CommonFloor founder Sumit Jain and redBus founder Phanindra Sama, among others.
“Unacademy’s vision is to distribute knowledge of the educators and innovators in the form of mini courses having lessons of not more than 10 minutes each,” said Gaurav Munjal, CEO, Unacademy, who started the company along with 24-year old Roman Saini. Saini is a doctor from AIIMS, and one India’s youngest IAS officers, who resigned as the Assistant Collector of Jabalpur to start the company.
Unacademy allows educators to create courses on the platform. All educators go through an interview process and selection is based on their experience. The company then helps educators create free courses on its platform. On the student side, Unacademy makes it easy for its learners to discover a course and then track their progress.
“Delivery of education in India needs radical shifts,” and Karthik Reddy,Managing Partner, Blume Ventures. “Unacademy is a manifestation of the team’s vision to make all forms of educative material so intuitive and accessible that learning becomes extremely interesting and scalable,” he added. Other investors in the round include TaxiForSure’s founder Aprameya Radhakrishna, and former Flipkart executive Sujeet Kumar.
The company’s YouTube channel has more than 15 million video views making it one of the top educational channels in the country, with more than 1500 lessons ranging from learning a new language to cracking government examinations.
Ed-tech companies have been in the limelight of late, thanks to Byju’s landmark deal of $75 million, and blossoming of many ed-tech companies. From handling tution classes through technology to partnering with schools and colleges for various activities to reaching to rural India through video conferencing and providing professional re-skilling courses, this sector is seeing it all.
The other startups in the ed-tech space include Vidyanext, flipClass, Simplilearn, Edureka and Toppr.
“By fluidly weaving them into the content format that Unacademy has, teaching and learning can be truly democratic – at an unprecedented scale,” said Reddy.
Source: The Economic Times
