Unacademy raises $1 mn from the likes of Paytm, Freecharge, Flipkart

Bengaluru-based online learning platform, Unacademy, has raised $1 million from investors in their second round of funding. Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, Freecharge co-founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, and Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma, among others, are backing the Bengaluru-based company. Unacademy, from its previous round of institutional funding in April, raised $500,000 in just four months.

The round also saw Blume Ventures, Stanford Angels India, WaterBridge Ventures, and Tracxn Labs invest in the education platform. Existing investors in the company -- Sujeet Kumar (ex-Flipkart), Aprameya Radhakrishnan (TaxiForSure's co-founder), Phanindra Sama (redBus co-founder), Sumit Jain (CommonFloor co-founder) and Vikas Malpani (CommonFloor co-founder) have also participated in this latest round.

"Unacademy presents a great example of the beginnings of an incredible shift in India's Internet - the ability of millions of new internet users using smartphones as their only access device to create and consume high quality curated educational content as easily as laying hands on a textbook," Business Standard quoted Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, as saying.

Times of India quoted Sachin Bansal, executive chairman at Flipkart, as saying, "Education and learning from the best-suited teachers and professionals is a global problem, which we believe Unacademy solves seamlessly with its interactive and intuitive content. In a short span of eight months, the founding team has proved that leveraging technology to empower its educators and students is a problem that can be solved effectively at scale."

The education tech space is the most looked after as the likes of Sequoia Capital-backed Byju raising $70 million in one of the largest investment rounds for an education company earlier this year. However, EduKart, Vedantu, flipClass, CueMath, Toppr, Simplilearn, and Vidyanext are some of the startups in the ed-tech space.