Unacademy ex-COO Vivek Sinha raises $11 million from Lightspeed, Matrix for edtech venture

This is Vivek Sinha’s second shot at entrepreneurship. He had founded e-commerce firm Buildzar but it had to be shut down.

Unacademy’s former chief operating officer (COO) Vivek Sinha has raised $11 million for his new edtech venture, three people aware of the developments have told Moneycontrol.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, angel investors like Oyo group CEO and founder Ritesh Agarwal and Unacademy CEO and co-founder Gaurav Munjal participated in the round, they added.

Sinha's new startup, registered in September, is likely to operate within the upskilling segment facilitating the healthcare industry, sources said. This comes at a time when the upskilling and higher education vertical within edtech sector has held its own in a bearish funding landscape.

The parent entity is registered under the name Beyond Odds, as per the corporate ministry, but the name of the company remains undisclosed.

When contacted, Sinha declined to comment. Matrix Partners, Lightspeed, Munjal, Agarwal and Sharma had not responded to Moneycontrol’s queries at the time of publishing the story.

Sinha, who was a business head at Oyo between April 2018 and September 2020, quit the travel tech company to join Unacademy. After a three-year stint, he left Unacademy and has now started his own venture.

Sinha’s resignation was among a series of top level departures at Unacademy, with chief of staff Abhyudayay Rana and chief financial officer Subramanian Ramachandran also moving out. The exits came a year after chief marketing officer Karan Shroff quit the company.

Also Read: Inside Unacademy: Slowing growth, failed acquisitions, a problem of plenty

While Sinha is no longer associated with the two companies, his stints seem to have helped him rope in Oyo's Agarwal and Unacademy's Munjal as angel investors. Along with Agarwal and Munjal, Ramakant Sharma, co-founder of Livspace, is also backing Sinha’s new venture.

The funding round is still on and Sinha is scouting for a few more angel investors, so the final contours of the deal could change, a source said.

The edtech venture would be Sinha’s second innings as an entrepreneur.

He had founded an e-commerce company, Buildzar, and even raised $4 million from Puneet Dalmia of Dalmia Cement (Bharat). Buildzar was shuttered because it failed to yield desired results.

Moneycontrol has reported that a slew of top executives were leaving startups to venture out on their own. Raising money for these operators- turned-founders has been easier because they scaled operations for somebody else.

Sinha raised money at a time when edtech funding has taken a hit. Edtech firms have raised around $700 million in 2023, so far, down over 70 percent from $2.4 billion raised last year, as per Tracxn, a private markets data provider.

“Everyone knows late stage edtech startups have been struggling to raise money but investors are flush with funds so they are willing to back early stage companies that are doing something different and not more of the same,” one of the people cited above said.