Unacademy raises $21 million Series C from Sequoia India, SAIF and Nexus

Unacademy | The online learning platform won $150 million infusion from SoftBank Corporation, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital India, General Atlantic and others in September 2020. (Image: Founders Roman Saini, Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh - Unacademy)

Banglore-based education technology company Unacademy is set to add more educators to its online learning platform after closing a USD 21 million Series C from Sequoia India, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures- all of whom returned from Unacademy's Series B funding, last year.

According to a report by Techcrunch, with the latest round of funding, Unacademy could become India's largest online educators, with over 10,000 teachers and three million registered users.

Apart from bringing in more educators, Unacademy will use the funds raised to invest in key categories like pre-med, the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and the Common Admission Test (CAT) as these examinations are prerequisites for most post-graduate programs.

Originally a YouTube channel created by co-founder Gaurav Munjal in 2010, Unacademy was officially launched by Hemesh Singh, Roman Saini and Munjal in 2015. The 3-year-old platform has now raised USD 38.6 million in total from venture funding.

While the platform offers its users a plethora of courses, the company made a name for itself by offering courses geared towards preparation for important exams in India.

Unacademy has two apps, one of them lets educators upload structured lessons and another through which the user accesses them. Although most lessons are available free of cost, the company launched a paid service called "Plus" last year which enables users to enter private discussion forums and attend live video classes for a per-course fee.