Facebook's second direct investment in India is an edtech startup – Unacademy

• Unacademy raised a funding of $110 million in a round led by General Atlantic and Facebook.
• The round also saw participation from Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital and Blume Ventures, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart among others.
• This is Facebook’s second direct investment in India.

Indian education startup Unacademy raised a series E round of funding of $110 million in a round led by General Atlantic and Facebook.

The round also saw participation from Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital and Blume Ventures and individual investors Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart and Sujeet Kumar, co-founder, Udaan.

With this round, Unacademy has given exits to some of its angel investors.

“We are seeing great learning outcomes through our subscription where learners can take Live classes by these educators. We now have more than 90,000 active subscribers. Our goal is to democratise education and become not just the largest educational organisation but the largest consumer internet story out of India,” said Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO of Unacademy.

Founded in 2015, Unacademy offers live interactive courses and educational courses to students. It has 10,000 educators on its platform, the company claims.

“With this investment in Unacademy, we are reinforcing our commitment to the Indian startup ecosystem as well as investing in a company that is transforming learning in India. We love that the company is fundamentally democratising education and driving innovation in new learning models,” said Ajit Mohan, VP and MD of Facebook India.

This is Facebook’s second direct investment in an Indian startup. In June 2019, Facebook invested an undisclosed amount in Indian social commerce startup Meesho. Meesho is a marketplace for resellers, and connects them with customers via social media channels like WhatsApp and Facebook.

Facebook had earlier acquired Bengaluru-based Little Eye Labs which has a software tool for analyzing the performance of Android apps.

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