Tiger Global's investment in Unacademy at $2 Billion
Unacademy is an online learning platform in India that has over 300,000 students within six months.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 23 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count.
Key takeaways
- Unacademy is an online learning platform in India that has over 300,000 students within six months.
- This online education platform has top educators onboard who have touched people’s lives in the remotest corner across India.
- They have witnessed success stories of thousands of students who have cracked the most challenging competitive examinations by enhancing their knowledge and advancing their ability to speak and write better.
An Introduction to Unacademy #
Unacademy is an online learning platform in India that has over 300,000 students within six months. This online education platform has top educators onboard who have touched people’s lives in the remotest corner across India. They have witnessed success stories of thousands of students who have cracked the most challenging competitive examinations by enhancing their knowledge and advancing their ability to speak and write better.
Unacademy helps students pursuing graduate-level courses and those who are preparing for competitive exams. Students watch live lessons on the Unacademy website or app from instructors and later engage in sessions to discuss the topics in detail. In recent months, this start-up has held numerous online interviews of high-profile people, including Indian politician Shashi Tharoor, on a range of topics that appealed to an audience beyond their student base.
This online ed-tech platform has amassed over 47,000 educators, who teach students in 5,000 Indian cities in more than 14 languages. Unacademy conducts nearly 150,000 live classes a month and has a collective watch time of more than two billion minutes per month.
About the Founders, Growth and Early Investments in Unacademy #
Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sachin Gupta are the founders of this ed-tech start-up company that began as an education YouTube channel in 2010. Previously, Gaurav and Hemesh were running Flatchat that was acquired by CommonFloor in 2014. Roman is a doctor from AIIMS and is one of the youngest persons to crack the Civil Services Examination.
Unacademy was officially registered as an education company in Bengaluru in the year 2015. Unacademy Subscription, previously known as Unacademy Plus, is a paid learning service provided by this privately held company. It has secured funding through various offerings, including investments from General Atlantic (the US private equity firm), Facebook (social networking giant), Blume Ventures, Nexus Ventures, and Flipkart.
In 2018, this ed-tech company acquired Wifistudy, YouTube-based online exam preparation and learning platform founded by Dinesh Godara in 2013 for $10 million. This platform focuses on preparing for the competitive public-sector exams, including banking, SSC, railway, and state police. In 2020, they acquired Kreatryx, founded by Ankit Goyal in 2014, to expand ESE and GATE preparation services. Further, they acquired CodeChef, a Mumbai-based online competitive programming platform, in June 2020. They also invested $50 million in PrepLadder, a Gurugram-based NEET PG-online coaching, in July 2020. Also, they invested $5 million to buy a large stake in the K12 learning platform, Mastree. Eventually, they also bought the UPSC test preparation platform, Coursavy, in September 2020. As of July 2020, Unacademy was valued at $1.45 billion.
The Surge due to the Pandemic #
The pandemic-hit year has been an eventful one for Unacademy, as they saw nearly half a billion-dollar investment flowing in and made a series of acquisitions. The Bengaluru-based company acquired five start-ups, including CodeChef, Coursavy, Mastree, PrepLadder, and Kreatryx. Also, they launched Graphy, a new product with a separate founding team.
They acquired the online algorithm and coding platform CodeChef in June for an undisclosed amount to start their own vertical to rivals the likes of Vedantu’s SuperCoders and Byju’s-owned Whitehat Jr.
Remarkably, all the ed-tech ventures mentioned above have one thing in common: Tiger Global. This New York-based hedge fund has substantial investments in Unacademy, Byju’s, and Vedantu. is quite bullish on India’s ed-tech growth.
Scott Shleifer, Partner at Tiger Global, stated on fundraising that the opportunity to improve lives through online education is enormous due to its sheer accessibility. He added, “We are very excited to partner with Unacademy and look forward to seeing it scale further.” The team at Unacademy has swiftly innovated to build a leading online platform, which takes education to the most distant corners in the country.
How Unacademy got Valued at $2 Billion? #
The Bengaluru-based start-up, Unacademy, has added two marquee investors to its cap table. While focusing on K-12 online education, this company has raised new funds from Tiger Global Management and Dragoneer Investment Group. As per a person familiar with the matter, the funding round is between $75 million to $100 million in size. With this, now the four-and-a-half-year-old start-up has a value of $2 billion. That’s an increase from $500 million in February 2020 when Facebook invested in it and $1.45 billion in September when SoftBank became its investor.
Gaurav Munjal, CEO of Unacademy said, “Our mission from Day One has been to democratize education and make it more affordable and accessible. We have consistently built the most iconic products which deliver high-quality education to everyone.”.
Munjal is delighted to welcome Tiger Global and Dragoneer as our partners in their journey. Both these marquee global investors have a history of partnering with innovative firms, which impacts people’s lives. The analysts at Goldman Sachs reports that the spending on education in India is among the highest globally.
The Summary of Tiger Global’s Investment in Unacademy #
With Unacademy raising an undisclosed amount in a fresh investment round from Tiger Global and Dragoneer Investment Group, fundraising in online learning start-ups continues unabated. The company has claimed that their group has valued at $2 billion in this transaction. This is the third round of funding in Unacademy in 2020 that propelled the company’s valuation to a nearly 38% jump.
Several education start-ups in India have reported skyrocketing growth in recent months as the schools remain shut across the country amid the coronavirus pandemic. Even though most Indians tend not to pay for the online services, ask Facebook and Google, both these tech giants count India as their biggest market in terms of users but make little in the country, and the education tech space is an outlier. Indian families continue to spend on their child’s education in the hopes of attaining a better future.
Questions and answers #
What is the main point? #
Unacademy is an online learning platform in India that has over 300,000 students within six months.
What else did the original piece say? #
This online education platform has top educators onboard who have touched people’s lives in the remotest corner across India.