Education is the most powerful weapon which can be used to change the world. But unfortunately, everybody doesn’t get the equal opportunities to harness the benefits of learning. There are various barriers causing obstruction to the path of learning, be it financial conditions, lack of resources or medium to avail the resources. The digital revolution has proved to be a boon for many and has reinforced the opportunities of getting educated. It is only due to the advancement in technologies like Cloud, AI, and others; we can make imparting education a very simpler process. Unacademy is a platform providing online educational services. Passionate educators upload their tutorial videos to this portal, which is accessible by the students all across the globe. The tutorials are compact collections on various topics like coding, science, history, and others and exam preparatory stuff of various kinds.
Foundation
Unacademy was officially launched in 2015 although it started as Youtube Channel back in 2010. It was co-founded by Gaurav Munjal and Hemesh Singh, who earlier founded Flat.to, which was acquired by Commofloor, Sachin Gupta earlier worked as an Assistant Director in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Roman Saini, who is an MBBS doctor and earlier posted as Assistant Collector in Madhya Pradesh.
Fundings
Unacademy has received funding a total funding of $US 17.5 Million in 4 rounds.
- It received an initial funding of $US 500K on May 11, 2016, led by Blume ventures and marquees angels such as Ranjan Anandan (Google), Sumit Jain(CommonFloor) and others.
- It received an additional funding of $US 1 Million on Aug 24, 2016, in the second round of external investment led by Blume Ventures, along with Stanford Angels and WaterBridge Ventures.
- It secured a funding of $US 4.5 Million in Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures.
- It received a funding of $US 11.5 Million in Series B funding led by Sequoia India and SAIF Partners.
About
Unacademy is a massive open online course(MOOC) platform. It has nearly 5550 videos uploaded related to education on various subjects for primary education like CBSE subjects, secondary education like Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, coding, preparation for top-rated examinations like CAT, GATE, UPSC, SSC, and others. All this content is available on the web portal as well as in the cross-platform app. It has got 2.1 million subscribers and 180 Million video views and 50 Milion monthly users.
Business Model
Currently, all the digital content available in Unacademy’s library is free but it has 2 revenue models, which were launched recently. In the first service, paid live classes would be provided to the registered students, wherein they would get classes from authorized educators. In the second model, subscription system would be enabled by which, students would be able to use the ad-free version of Unacademy and save videos offline too. Besides these, it provides incentives to authorized and verified educators through Unacademy plus, who conduct live classes for students and contribute to the lessons of study material with some conditions applied.
Competition
The market of education in India is as big as $US 12 Billion. There are big players in this segment of online Education like Coursera, edX, Udacity, Byju’s, Khan Academy, standing as competitors to Unacademy.
That’s a great initiative, really. We’re also working on building MemoZing, a new e-learning platform that will be available to students all over the world who will be able to customize their e-learning experience, prepare for exams in the way that works best for them, and even to monetize their content, by sharing their e-learning preparation session with other students taking the same exam. In addition to that, the platform will use cognitive-psychology-based brain hacks to invert the forgetting curve and make newly acquired knowledge become literally unforgettable. You can learn more about it at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/development-of-the-e-learning-network-memozing-net/coming_soon.
My son Harshendu Swarnakar wants to join your academy .