General Atlantic May Lead Unacademy’s $100 Mn Series E Round

Bengaluru-based edtech startup Unacademy may raise $100 Mn in Series E funding. The round is speculated to see participation from New York-based private equity firm General Atlantic (GA) and venture capital firm, GGV Capital.

A Livemint report said that the round may value Unacademy at $400 Mn. It said that the funding round is expected to close in the next six weeks, with the participation of more investors such as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. It further cited sources to say that the investors are bullish about the company given the subscription’s prospects, which has already become the main revenue driver for the startup.

Unacademy has till date raised a total of $88.6 Mn from investors such as Steadview Capital, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures among others.

Founded in 2015 by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh, Unacademy had begun its journey with a free YouTube tutorial to teach students, but in 2015, the company started offering free learning in lessons on every possible topic in multiple languages.

Today, the company has more than 10K registered educators and 13 Mn learners. The company claims to have 100 Mn monthly views across its various platforms such as Unacademy, Unacademy Plus, Wifistudy, Chamomile Tea with Toppers, Unacademy Studios and The Solutionists.

Inc42 had recently reported that the company’s revenue has grown 3.19X in FY19 reaching INR 21.89 Cr, as against INR 5.22 Cr in FY18. But, for FY19, the company’s losses are 4.12X of its total revenue reaching INR 90.27 Cr, as against INR 23.58 Cr in FY18.

We had noted that it has started generating revenue from its Unacademy Plus portal, which is its subscription model. Further, the revenue from subscription plans is based upon the number of classes provided on a gross basis. And interestingly, for FY19, most of the company’s operational revenue came in from subscriptions.

The company is competing against players such as Byju’s, Toppr, Vedantu etc. Indian edtech segment is expected to be a $1.96 Bn market by 2021. According to DataLabs by Inc42, there were 3500 edtech startups in India in 2018. Between 2014-H1 2019, edtech startups have raised $1.27 Bn across 287 deals.

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