Ali Hasan
Unacademy is on the Verge of becoming the Biggest Educational Platform
Introduction – Unacademy is an Indian educational technology company, based in Bangalore. Originally created as a YouTube channel in 2010 by Gaurav Munjal, the company was founded in 2015 by Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh.
The company has a network of over 50,000 educators, and offers preparation material for several professional and educational entrance exams. Unacademy lessons are in the form of Live Classes both free and via subscription.
Early Days – Unacademy began as a humble YouTube channel in the year 2010. It was single handedly run by Gaurav Munjal, one of the three founders of the same. Hemesh Singh joined him shortly and the duo had the channel running ever since.
Roman Saini joined the team in 2015 and soon enough, the trio decided to launch Unacademy as an online education company. Even though there was strong competition in the field at the time, they managed to find the right audience.
Later on, the founders started pondering on the idea of slowly monetizing the services they provided. This is what led to the launch of Unacademy as an official educational organization, which still gave out classes for free. But this time around, they made some tweaks along the way. They introduced live classes, which were only available to the paid members.
Again they launched an ad-free version where only members who have paid a subscription fee are given access. One of the biggest advantages of the platform is that they provide coaching for the most prestigious exams of the nation such as UPSC and CAT.
The team was able to channel in the right niche and the people were willing to pay the fees also. This opened up multiple opportunities to take their firm to the next level. They started providing content for courses such as computer programming aka coding, spoken English and other practically useful classes gained a lot of participants over the time.
Unacademy Plus is the premium version of their app, which had more personalized services and access to a large number of courses which were not available otherwise.
Marketing Strategy – Unacademy used a marketing campaign where they thanked Learners and Educators. They thanked their audience as it was because of them that they became India’s largest learning platform but the campaign had a small twist.
They credited their audiences more as believers and less as learners or educators because anyone who was with the platform believed in the platform. The platform said that the belief of their audiences in them is their biggest strength. They used 2 hastags in their campaigns which were as follows:-
- #ThankYouFromUnacademy
- #UnacademyBelieve
User Base & Valuation – Unacademy has grown over the years and now they have positioned themselves as a leading education platform where they provide solutions to almost everything related to education.
As of June 2021, they have:-
- More than 5 million active users
- More than 150,000 live classes
- More than 50,000 educators
- More than 2 billion minutes of learning content
- More than 49 million students
They have more than 1.7 million subscribers on their official YouTube channel where they have posted approximately 4,000 videos. They also have multiple YouTube channels where they educate students on different stuff. They have more than 10 million downloads on the Google play store.
As of December 2020, Unacademy was valued at $2 billion.
Funding – Unacademy has raised a total of $398.5M in funding over 11 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Feb 23, 2021 from a Venture – Series Unknown round. They are funded by a total of 36 investors. Sachin Tendulkar and Tiger Global Management are their most recent investors.
There investors are as follows:-
- General Atlantic
- Steadview Capital
- Dragoneer Investment Group
- Nexus Venture Partners
- Sequoia Capital
- Tiger Global Management
- Sachin Tendulkar
Revenues – Unacademy recorded INR 86 Cr revenue with INR 386.7 Cr as expenses, leading up to INR 300 Cr loss. For FY20, the startup recorded a 4x increase in revenue from INR 21.8 Cr in FY2019 to INR 86 Cr in FY2020.
But it also reported a 3.4x increase in its expenses to INR 386.7 Cr, leading to a net loss of INR 300 Cr. In comparison, the company reported INR 112 Cr in expenses and INR 90 Cr net loss in FY2019.
Acquisitions – Unacademy has acquired 9 organizations. Their most recent acquisition was Handa Ka Funda on Mar 23, 2021.
Their other acquisitions are as follows:-
- TapChief
- NeoStencil
- Coursavy
- Mastree
- PrepLadder
- CodeChef
- Kreatryx
- WiFiStudy
Controversy – In May 2020, Unacademy’s security came into question with a ‘For Sale’ ad on the Dark Web, which promised to sell 22 Million Unacademy accounts’ sensitive information for $2000.
The data dump (as obtained and claimed by few researchers) included Names, Usernames, Email Ids, Passwords, and other account details. Unacademy authorities later confirmed that almost 11 Million accounts got compromised.
In a statement, Unacademy claimed that no sensitive information had been compromised and nothing valuable was misused.
Conclusion – To sum it up, in the post covid era, we need more and more startups like Unacademy which can deliver quality education at the fraction of a cost charged earlier.
A startup that was simply started as a small YouTube channel is today one of the biggest education platforms imparting quality education at all levels to various students just at their fingertips at a nominal cost.
Quality education at fingertips at an affordable cost is exactly what millions of students in India need right now. Startups like Unacademy is the need of the hour and we wish them all the very best for their future.
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