Facebook Invests $20 Million In Indian Education Startup, Unacademy

Indian education startup Unacademy gets a big boost from Facebook as it announced on Wednesday that the social media giant joined the company's latest funding round.

Unacademy received $110 million in Series E from investors led by New York private equity firm General Atlantic. Other investors that joined the round include Sequoia Capital India, Facebook, Nexus, SteadView, and Blume Ventures. The CEO of Flipkart Kalyan Krishnamurthy and co-founder of Udaan Sujeet Kumar were also investors in the round. Notably, Facebook is said to have chipped in $20 million, TechCrunch reported.

Since 2015, Unacademy's business revolves around educating students through a variety of online courses ranging from personal development, programming to exam preparation. In its platform, Unacademy offers structured courses for those taking UPSC CSE (India's national civil service exam) or even GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) and the English language test IELTS.

The startup's platform offers live classes, live tests, and quizzes, along with detailed reports and analysis. It is also available as a mobile app which allows students to learn on the go.

Unacademy's new funds will suit two purposes: add more exam and test preparation categories to their already extensive choices and hire more educators.

"Our mission from day one has been to make high-quality education affordable and accessible to everyone. There are more than 800 Educators who teach live on Unacademy every day with hundreds of thousands of Learners attending these classes from their smartphones," co-founder and chief executive Gaurav Munjal tweeted.

"We have also heavily invested in making high-quality free classes available on YouTube and our own platform where we see more than 150M video views every month. Our goal is to not just become the largest education organisation but to be the biggest consumer internet organization in India," he added.

The company now has a total funding amount of almost $200 million, according to Crunchbase, and the source for TechCrunch said that the Unacademy is now valued at $400 million.

With Facebook joining Unacademy's investors, it marks only the second time that the social network invested in an Indian startup. Last time it was in a Series D funding round with Bangalore-based social commerce startup Meesho.