Unacademy raises $50 million in secondary round from Tiger, Dragoneer, others

As part of the round, the investors acquired additional shares worth $50 million, doubling their investment. The latest transaction follows the round in November when Tiger Global and Dragoneer Investment Group invested in the Unacademy Group at a valuation of $2 billion. Founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh in 2015, Unacademy was started as a YouTube channel by Gaurav Munjal in 2010. The company has grown to become the country's leading online learning platform with a network of 48,000 registered educators and over 40 million learners. It allows educators to create videos for courses from school-level learning to college entrance exams across streams. It claims to be facilitating over 150,000 live classes on the platform each month with a collective watch time being over 2 billion minutes per month.

In 2020, coronavirus fired up the online education space, as students have been forced to learn from home. Startups such as Unacademy, Byju’s, Vedantu, WhiteHat Jr and Eruditus all benefited from this, raising money at higher valuations in a few months’ time. In a nutshell, Indian ed-tech startups raised a record billion dollars in 2020 alone.

Investor such as Tiger Global is seen betting on this market aggressively. The hedge fund has invested in two other large ed-tech startups besides Unacademy which are Byju's and Vedantu.