The founders of OYO and Zomato pump in money to make edtech startup Unacademy worth $3.4 billion ⁠— a ten fold jump in 18 months

Online learning platform Unacademy is now valued at $3.44 billion after the latest round of fundraising, where it got investments to the tune of $440 million. Over the last 18 months, the valuation of the Unacademy Group has risen almost 10 times, the company reportedly said in a statement.

This was the Series H round of funding for Unacademy where Aroa Ventures, the family office of hotel chain OYO’s Founder Ritesh Agarwal, and Deepinder Goyal, Co-Founder and CEO at Zomato, participated. Some angel investors of Unacademy have exited in this round.

Aside from these, existing investors like General Atlantic, Tiger Global and Softbank Vision Fund put in more money.This is the second investment by Tiger Global, and General Atlantic who increased their stake in Unacademy in January this year.

The different shades of India’s booming edtech

The six-year old startup founded by Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini, Unacademy has a growing network of more than 50,000 registered educators and over 62 million learners, in 14 Indian languages across 5,000 cities.

Unacademy is known for its offerings that help students prepare for competitive exams and it has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the shift to online learning. Unacademy differentiates itself from Byju’s, which relies on pre-recorded content, and Vedantu that is known for its live-tutoring.

India’s edtech industry, which had an annual revenue pool of $700 million at the end of March 2020, saw its business double in the following year due to the pandemic, according to data from Goldman Sachs. The global investment bank expects the entire edtech space to be worth $30 billion dollars by March 2024 as Indians spend the most on education, as a proportion of household consumption, after China.

Unacademy has been acquiring other startups amidst an edtech boom

Late last month, Unacademy announced that it has acquired game streaming platform Rheo TV. Rheo TV is a platform that helps professional game streamers livestream their gameplays and monetise those feeds.

In February, Unacademy acquired TapChief, a professional networking and "future-of-work" platform, at a valuation of ₹100 crore.





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