Unacademy: Reshaping The Educational System Of India

Just like all the major sectors across the world have been revolutionized by technology, educational sector is no different. The old and conventional teaching methods have now been replaced by the online tutorials.

Needless to say, the EdTech era has made a huge impact on the younger generation in the past few years and its volatile wave has hit the demographics of learners across all age-groups in India.

Owing to the current scenario, EdTech firms have been rising like a phoenix as online education has now become a necessity rather than mere option for the students.

Having said that, one such online platform has also made a name for itself in the educational sector in a short span of time and it’s none other than, Unacademy.

In this blog, we will tell you about the startup story of Unacademy and how its founders came up with an idea of launching this company.

At first, let’s understand what services Unacademy offer:

About Unacademy

Unacademy is an online platform that makes both learning and teaching easy with its educational videos and lectures by the experienced educators. The app is built not only for the 10 + 2 students but also for the young teenagers who are practicing to crack the competitive exams like CAT, UPSC, GATE etc. The company has achieved an extensive growth in the past few years with more than 10,000 educators and over 13 million users.

How did it begin ?

In 2010, Gaurav Munjal, while studying in college, started Unacademy as a YouTube channel that offered free education. With this platform, Gaurav wanted to target those students who want to get a good education in less money. After a point, when his channel started to gain popularity among the masses, Gaurav along with his other two partners, Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini decided to register Unacademy as a brand in 2015 under the parent company Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt.

Founders & Team

After completing his B.Tech from NMIMS University Mumbai, Gaurav Munjal started doing jobs and YouTube videos simultaneously. He launched his first venture FlatChat, a real estate platform, with his friend Hemesh. Later it was acquired by commonfloor.com in 2014 for an undisclosed amount.

If we talk about Roman Saini, he cracked the UPSC exam at a young age of 22 with an all-India rank of 18. He had quit his job as the Assistant Collector to join the Unacademy and offer online coaching, helping the underprivileged students.

Growth in the market

Presently, the company has its own mobile application as well as a credible YouTube channel. As of December 2021, Unacademy comprises thousands of online educators with over 315+ million total views for their YouTube videos.

You would be surprised to know that Unacademy has gained over 50,000 registered educators and over 49 million learners in a very short span. Despite a stiff competition in the market, the company even entered the unicorn club in 2020. According to Venture Intelligence, Unacademy is currently valued at $3.4 billion (Rs 25,770 crore).

Reason behind the success of Unacademy

There are several factors which influenced the success of Unacademy but the most important one is their well-planned strategy of monetizing their services at the right time. The biggest drawback with other popular education channels was that they never understood the right time to monetize their popularity.

However, the founders of Unacademy were smart enough to understand that YouTube might always remain free for such kind of educational platforms and it would get difficult to make a business out of the popularity of the channel in future. Hence, they came up with an idea to create an app and convince their followers or subscribers to use that platform alongside their YouTube videos.

Another thing which has put Unacademy’s team on the road to success is that they focused on high-value intensive courses like the preparation for IAS. In a country like India, where there are lakhs of aspirants for the civil services exams, the recognition of such kind of educational platform at such a huge level is not so surprising. After all, what could be better for a student than getting a free offering by an IAS officer?

Overall, backed by some of the major corporations in the world, such as, Facebook, General Atlantic, and Sequoia Capital, Unacademy has been doing very well so far.