Unacademy: Helping people turn educators to millions of students

The $117-million start-up gets over 100 million video views a month and has 400,000 daily active users; its promoters have a mission to make it the world's largest online education platform

Gaurav Munjal, the 29-year-old engineer, entrepreneur and founder of education platform Unacademy, loves Quora. He’s active on the Q&A website, dropping his thoughts on productivity, academic subjects, and more recently, entrepreneurship to his now 139,000 followers.

But Quora isn’t the only place he frequents; he’s a compulsive tweeter and regularly publishes blogs on Linkedin and Medium. 

Munjal says he is a heavy user of online platforms and is fascinated by their power to facilitate constructive engagement and disseminate knowledge. 

When he was at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Mumbai, where he studied engineering till 2012, he ran a couple of websites and a fashion blog that made him money to fund his excursions. He even a setup a YouTube channel in 2010, which was later to become Unacademy.

It is perhaps this experience — solid grounding in tech and platforms — that allowed Munjal to scale Unacademy to its current size: 100 million video views a month, 400,000 daily active users, and a content library of hundreds of thousands of lessons.

Today, Unacademy is a $117-million start-up and among the top sites for preparing for competitive examinations for civil services, state government posts, admissions to IITs and IIMs, and several other courses.

Unacademy’s financial backers comprise a marquee list: angel investors Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Vijay Shekhar Sharma, and VC firms such as Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners.

But Unacademy's central position in Indian test preparation market is more a function of its unique business model.  

Unacademy is a “platform” where anyone can pitch to start a course. After a basic screening, the educator is given tools to design a course into a set of video lessons. The videos are in presentation-like format accompanied by a voice-over. 

The company offers a full tech stack to educators to design, upload and publish videos and analytics to help them grow their audience. For learners, they can either discover courses topic-wise, or follow their preferred tutors. The platform is free for learners.

“While there were other companies innovating on how to create entertainment videos on the phone, we innovated on how to create great educational videos,” says Munjal.

With this model, Unacademy has not only created a vast pool of content, it has also given an avenue to thousands of educators and academics to teach online. Several IAS officers and full-time government employees, besides classroom teachers, have taken on hundreds of thousands of followers on Unacademy.

There are 10,000 educators on Unacademy of which 3,000 actively publish new material and courses. Now with Unacademy Plus, a paid service that offers end-to-end test preparation courses to test series and problem solving, the company is on-boarding educators on contract to design specific content for various exam categories. Unacademy has also entered Indonesia and is setting up in Brazil.

In his mission to make Unacademy world’s largest online learning platform, Munjal is joined by co-founders Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh. Saini is Munjal’s friend from native Jaipur, whom Munjal convinced to start teaching on Unacademy YouTube channel back in the day. Saini had cracked the civil services exam and joined the services in 2013, only to leave it in 2015 and join Unacademy as a full-time co-founder.

Singh was a co-founder at Munjal’s first start-up Flatchat, an app for finding flats and flatmates. Flatchat was acquired by CommonFloor in 2014. The duo stayed on at CommonFloor for another year and half before starting starting out again. At Unacademy, Singh serves as the CTO.

Munjal says there’s a long way to go for Unacademy. The company has so far built competencies in the test prep category and is constantly exploring new areas. Like many people who turn to Unacademy for mentorships, Munjal is happy he too has great mentors like Bhavin Turakhia, founder of Directi, and Sumit Jain, who founded CommonFloor, to support him in his journey.