Education technology startup Unacademy has raised $11.5 million Series B funding led by Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. Existing investors and angels including Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round.

The fresh capital will help the company to tap international markets, and to accelerate its product and technology as well as scale to newer categories including personality development, new languages and job interviews. The company will also create original content with its top educators on the platform.

With this funding, Unacademy plans to grow tenfold, and is looking to onboard more than 10,000 educators across the globe over the next 18 months. The platform currently has around 50,000 lessons online and over 1 million registered users, while on its YouTube channel it has close to 1 million subscribers.

Unacademy began as an educational YouTube channel by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. It later launched its online learning platform last year, that let educators to create courses on various subjects. All educators go through an interview process and selection is based on their experience.

Previous Funding

-With the latest round the startup has raised a total of $17.5 M in four investment rounds, as per Crunchbase data. Early this year, Unacademy had raised $4.5 million in its Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners and existing investor Blume Ventures.

-In May last year, the company had raised $500,000(about Rs 3.3 crore) in seed capital, through a funding round led by Blume Ventures, along with angel investors including Rajan Anandan (Google), Sumit Jain (CommonFloor), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Taxi4Sure), Sujeet Kumar (earlier Flipkart), Phanindra Sama (RedBus) among others.  In 2015, It had raised $1 million from  a clutch of investors including Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, with Blume Ventures leading the round.

Competition

– The e-learning space in India is crowded with a lot of large and medium companies jostling for a foothold. Unacedemy’s direct rival at the moment is Byju’s Learning, which had raised an undisclosed amount of funding in July this year. Overall the company has raised around $244 million in funding from multiple investors since its launch in 2008.

– In June this year, IL&FS Education & Technology Services Ltd. (IETS), the social infrastructure arm of IL&FS Group, launched ‘Geneo’, a personalized digital learning platform targeting the K-12 segment.

– Moreover, publicly listed e-commerce company Infibeam has also tapped education space by starting BuildaBazaar for e-learning, which allows schools, tutors, colleges, professors, and companies to access a private cloud to upload multimedia content and maintain a library.

– Also, search giant Google has an Internet education program for rural women in India, while Amazon India has an Exam Central product which lists solved papers and articles from academicians for entrance exams.

– Other players in the space are Eruditus Executive Education,WizIQ, iNurture, UpGrad, Jigsaw Academy, CollegeDekho, S Chand, Smartivity Labs and Schoolguru among others.