BENGALURU: A 3x rise in valuation, a 4x surge in the subscriber base and an entry into India's $1 billion startup (unicorn) club that too amidst the COVID pandemic. Everything is falling in place for Unacademy, an online test preparation platform that is managing to get marquee investors to queue up.
On Wednesday, Unacademy said that it has raised $150 million in a fresh funding round led by Japan's tech giant, SoftBank, making it the latter's first investment in India in 2020.
Unacademy saw its valuation rise to $1.45 billion from $510 million five months ago, turning it into India's second edtech unicorn after Byjus, which is valued at over $10 billion. Besides, existing investors General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Facebook, and Blume Ventures also participated in the round.
Unacademy's CEO and co-founder, Gaurav Munjal, who turns 30 on September 8, said in a statement, "Learning from the best experts to achieve a life goal has mostly been a privilege, available only to those living in the top few cities of the country. At Unacademy, we are breaking that barrier and helping people achieve their life's most important goals, by giving them access to the best coaching from experts in the field. We're delighted to welcome SoftBank as a partner to that vision. We started with test preparation and with this partnership, we will launch other goals on our platform."
From a modest Youtube teacher to the CEO of a billion-dollar company in a matter of five years, Munjal has targetted the quintessential younger Indians who aspire to get into central government institutions, banking, engineering services etc and have moved from training through conventional models to online platforms. Currently, the platform has over 18,000 educators and 350,000 subscribers.
The company caters to the learning needs for 35+ competitive exams, besides important life goals such as Chess. Unacademy said that it plans to utilise the funds to launch new products and build a world-class team and organisation.
The onset of the pandemic has led to a boom in the online education sector in India as schools, colleges continue to remain shut.
Apart from attracting more than $1 billion funding over the past few months from various investors, the deal flows in the segment have remained strong with acquisitions of vertical players.