Unacademy Acquires Gate Academy For Undisclosed Amount

Unacademy Acquires Gate Academy; Founder Umesh Dhande Joins As VP

SUMMARY

With this, the startup has made nearly 12 acquisitions between 2020 and 2022, focussed on expanding verticals and team

The edtech giant has also launched the Unacademy One initiative, where it has 50 YouTube channels providing students with life skills

The move comes at a time when Unacademy has been mired with controversies including layoff, its tussle with Allen and more

Edtech unicorn Unacademy has acquired test prep startup Gate Academy for an undisclosed amount. Following the acquisition, the entire team of Gate Academy will join the edtech giant. Further, Gate Academy’s founder Umesh Dhande has joined the company as vice president, academics, GATE & ESE.

With this acquisition, Unacademy has expanded its presence into the graduate aptitude test in engineering (GATE) test prep category.

The move comes at a time when the company has been mired with controversies including layoffs, poaching (read: Allen Vs Unacademy), operations shut down and the multi-modal business formats. Going ahead with this, it has added another product to its funnel—Unacademy One, a YouTube content-focussed test prep product.

It is a collection of 50 YouTube channels, some from Unacademy and others include influencer teachers (such as Mohit Bhargava, Anshul Agarwal, Garima Goel and more).

The House Of Unacademy

The edtech unicorn, backed by the likes of General Atlantic, Meta and Nexus Ventures, was last valued at $3.4 Bn after its Series H fundraise of $340 Mn. The startup is a test prep provider, offering online coaching for IIT-JEE, UPSC, SSC, NEET and GATE, among others.

With the launch of Unacademy Centres, the startup also ventured into offline coaching for IIT-JEE and NEET prep. The Bengaluru-based startup has been on an acquisition spree as well for the past two years and has acquired nearly 12 startups between 2020 and 2022, including Swiflearn, Spayee, Rheo TV, Handa Ka Funda and more. Now, it has added Gate Academy to the club of brands.

While some acquisitions were meant for business expansions, others were for expanding the Unacademy team, founder Gaurav Munjal has previously told Inc42. The umbrella organisation also branches into gamified upskilling vertical Relevel, live content courses provider Graphy and experience centres Unacademy Stores.

The startup claims to have over 91,000 registered educators and more than 99 Mn learners learning in 14 languages from 10,000 cities.