Unacademy raises funding from Tiger Global, Dragoneer; hits $2 bn valuation

By Narinder Kapur

  • 25 Nov 2020
Credit: 123RF.com

Education-technology firm Unacademy, which joined the unicorn club of startups valued at $1 billion or more in September, has significantly bumped up its valuation by adding two more marquee names to its investor list.

Tiger Global Management and Dragoneer Investment Group have committed an undisclosed sum to Bengaluru-based Unacademy, which is operated by Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd.

This values the startup at $2 billion (Rs 14,781 crore), it said in a statement. 

In September, Unacademy raised $150 million (Rs 1,094 crore) in a new funding round led by SoftBank, catapulting the edtech company to $1.45 billion valuation.

“The Unacademy team has innovated rapidly to build a leading platform that is taking education to the farthest corners of India,” Tiger Global partner Scott Shleifer said.

Unacademy was originally set up as an educational YouTube channel in 2016 by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sachin Gupta.

It helps educators create lessons on the Educator App, which learners access via the Learning App. It has more than 47,000 educators and over 40 million learners across 5,000 cities in 14 languages.

In 2018, early-stage venture capital firm WaterBridge Ventures, which had invested $1 million in Unacademy in 2016, exited with a return of five times its investment.

The edtech startup has also been actively making acquisitions.

In July 2020, Unacademy struck its third reported acquisition of the year by picking up a majority stake in K-12 platform Mastree.

The move came just a week after it announced the acquisition of medical education platform PrepLadder Pvt. Ltd for $50 million. Prior to that, it acquired Delhi-based online exam preparation startup Kreatryx in March.