Unacademy, an e-learning app, is set to receive funding, in a fresh funding round led by Japan’s Softbank Vision Fund. It is a Bengaluru based ed-tech.
Unacademy is yet to receive the funding, once received, its valuation would reach up to $1.45 Bn, the company said. Existing investors for Unacademy include General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Facebook, and Blume Ventures also participated in the funding round.
The company, which claims to have about 350,000 active paid subscribers, will primarily use the proceeds to launch its much anticipated K-12 product in less than four weeks, which will also see it clashing head-to-head with Byju’s, India’s largest ed-tech company. Unacademy also plans to launch more niche offerings, such as chess subscriptions and computer programming.
Sumer Juneja, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said, “We have been closely tracking Unacademy for the last 18 months and have been impressed by their growth, quality of the product, and consumer engagement. They are truly democratizing education in India and we look forward to helping them scale even further.”
“We have not missed a round at Unacademy..,” said said Karthik Reddy, founder of Blume Ventures, am early backer of the company. The rule of thumb is simple. Do we think the founder will build beyond 5x from here? If so, let’s try and play. And, so we did..” he added.
Unacademy counts a host of angel investors like redBus founder Phanindra Sama, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, TaxiforSure co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, among others.
Byju’s valuation has gone up to $10 BN, from $8 billion in January, while live online learning platform Vedantu also saw its valuation soar to $800 Million recently.
Similar to Eruditus, which raised $113 Mn from Facebook, led to add up its valuation to $800 million.