General Atlantic looks to invest in Unacademy

Bengaluru-based Ed-tech firm Unacademy is going to raise USD 100 million in a Series E funding round which is expected to put its valuation at USD 400 million.

According to reports, New York-based private equity firm General Atlantic (GA) is a potential investor in the round along with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, and GGV Capital, a USD 6 billion global venture capital firm. The funding round is expected to close in the next six weeks.

GA is also an investor in Indian Ed-tech giant Byju’s. Globally, it has investments in European online learning platform OpenClassrooms and Brazilian Ed-tech firm SAS. On the other hand, GGV Capital has previously invested in B2B online retailer Udaan. Globally, it has invested in tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance.

Unacademy was started in 2015 by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh, as a YouTube channel and later started disseminating content from its own website. The company has till date raised a total of USD 88.6 million from investors such as Sequoia India, Blume Ventures, Steadview Capital, SAIF Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners, among others.

As per reports, the investors are bullish about the company because of its subscription prospects. The Unacademy Plus portal is generating revenue from subscriptions and its plans are based upon the number of classes provided on a gross basis. For FY19, most of the company’s operational revenue came in from its subscriptions.

Today, Unacademy has more than 10,000 registered educators and 13 million learners. The company claims to attract more than 100 million monthly views across its different platforms such as Unacademy, Unacademy Plus, Unacademy Studios, The Solutionists, Wifistudy and Chamomile Tea with Toppers.

The company seems to be investing aggressively for expansion and is not shy about taking losses. Its revenue has grown about 3.19 times in FY19 reaching INR 21.89 crore, as against INR 522 crore in FY18. But for FY19, the company’s losses are 4.12 times its total revenue reaching INR 90.27 crore, as against INR 23.58 crore in FY18, as per reports.

Indian Ed-tech segment is a fast-growing market and is expected to reach a valuation of USD 1.96 billion by 2021. As per reports, there were 3500 Ed-tech startups in India in 2018.

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