Unacademy acquires TapChief to help students get their dream jobs – its seventh acquisition in the last one year

• The deal valued TapChief at ₹100 crore, with all investors getting an exit and the entire team will be joining Unacademy.
• TapChief founded in 2016 by BITS Pilani Alumni, Shashank Murali, Binay Krishna, and Arjun Krishna, helps students and professionals interact with experts and also work with them.
• In September 2020, Unacademy entered the unicorn club and further raised funding in November at a valuation of over $2 billion.

Indian edtech unicorn Unacademy today announced that it is acquiring a majority stake in TapChief, a Bengaluru-based professional networking startup. The deal valued TapChief at ₹100 crore. All of TapChief investors, including Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Blume Ventures among others, will be exiting the company and the entire team will be joining Unacademy.

TapChief, founded in 2016 by BITS Pilani Alumni, Shashank Murali, Binay Krishna, and Arjun Krishna, helps students and professionals interact with experts and also work with them. The company claimed that professionals on the platform have completed “over 50,000 gigs for Fortune 500 Companies, Unicorns, Venture-backed Startups and SMBs in India”.

“Our endeavour at Unacademy has always been to democratise education and make learning accessible and affordable for everyone. TapChief shares a similar ethos in a different space, as evident from the open community of professionals and learners they’ve created,” said Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO, Unacademy Group in a statement.

Munjal further broke down the reason behind the deal on Twitter.


“Unacademy started by levelling the playing field for students who can’t travel to Kota, Delhi and other cities by getting them access to these educators and highest quality content for a fraction of the cost. And now it’s time for us to help students get their dream jobs by getting them the best education and access to top companies which they are not getting,” he said on Twitter.

The startup is the seventh company to be acquired by Unacademy in the last one year, during which the startup has seen a huge uptick in users thanks to the online shift in learning, during the COVID-19 pandemic.


In September 2020, Unacademy had entered the unicorn club with a $150 million cheque from Japanese investment firm SoftBank, after 5 years of starting up. In November 2020, the edtech unicorn’s valuation soared to $2 billion as it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from New York-based Tiger Global Management and the US-based Dragoneer Investment Group.

Unacademy had also raised funding from Facebook in February, the social media giant’s second direct investment in India.

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