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Unacademy: From a Startup to one of the largest online teaching platforms

This article gives you a complete outlook on the birth and growth of one of the largest online teaching platforms in India -
This article gives you a complete outlook on the birth and growth of one of the largest online teaching platforms in India – Unacademy.

Index

  1. Introduction
  2. About the founders
  3. Journey of Unacademy
  4. Business Model

Introduction

We all know that almost everything digitalized now. Unlike the olden times, people need not step out to complete their tasks, whether it’s shopping, payments, and many more.  Just like this, many online learning platforms started to rise in the past two to three years. The online learning trend spread like wildfire, and many people began to enroll themselves in these platforms. Unacademy was one of these online platforms.

Now, we can say that Unacademy is one of the best platforms and offers a range of courses. One of the best things about Unacademy is that the student or the user can learn any new skill from the comfort of his/her house. This was remarkable and gathered a lot of attention—Unacademy headquartered in Bangalore, the IT capital of India.

According to reports, Unacademy currently has a family of twenty million-plus students.  The current net worth of Unacademy lies between 200 to 300 million USD.

According to an analysis, the net worth of Unacademy expected to increase eight folds by 2021. Every student who has a decent smartphone and a stable Internet connection can enroll themselves in a course on Unacademy.

Now, let’s learn about the founders of Unacademy.

The Founders of unacademy

Gaurav Munjal
Unacademy Founders – Gaurav Munjal (Middle), Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini

Gaurav Munjal founded Unacademy. The other two founders, Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini, actually joined the company later on.

Gaurav initially started a YouTube channel named Unacademy way back in 2010. This was the birth of Unacademy. He started the circuit during his engineering time and started uploading educational videos on the channel. Later on, Gaurav began working with Directi to build software. Before continuing with Unacademy, Gourav started his own company known as Flat.to. Later on, this was sold to a firm known as Common Floor. After Gaurav started Unacademy, Hemesh Singh left a well-paid job in a company known as FlatChat and joined Unacademy.

He is currently the CTO of the company. Roman Saini, a medical graduate, who cracked the UPSC exam at a very young age of 21, joined Unacademy later on.

The journey of unacademy

unacademy

As mentioned above, Unacademy started as a YouTube channel, which slowly developed into an online learning platform.

Gaurav, one of the founders of Unacademy, mentioned that imparting knowledge is a step up to create a much better world. The YouTube channel started in 2010, and gradual developments made later on. Hemesh joined the YouTube channel later on and started teaching with Gaurav.

Roman Saini joined the team in 2015. The trio then officially launched Unacademy- a platform for learning.

This launch was successful. Even though many such online learning platforms came up at that time, Unacademy targeted the right audience and attracted the users.

Unacademy reached a level that currently, the platform crossed the 20 million user-mark and around 10 million subscribers.

unacademy’s Business Model

unacademy - Website Screenshot
unacademy – Website Screenshot

Initially, Unacademy gave our free courses through YouTube. Later on, the three founders started monetizing and charging for their service. This led to an official website launch of Unacademy. Soon enough, the platform was official and certified. Even after this, the founders still gave out lessons for free.

But, slight tweaks and changes were made. The platform introduced live classes. The tutors of Unacademy started teaching live. The students could then reach out to them and interact directly. This was an excellent update for Unacademy and attracted many users. Of course, the live feature was a premium feature, and students who paid for the services could avail it.

After a while, Unacademy started coaching for the most notable and prestigious examinations of India, including CAT and UPSC. Many students wanted tutorials on these exams, and this was a total success.

As Unacademy widened the range of topics on which they tutored, it saw a significant rise in the number of subscriptions. Many people were willing to pay the subscription fee to get tutorials. The platform figured out the sectors on which they had to give more importance to. Many programming courses like Python, Javascript, etc. introduced by Unacademy. As the field of Computer Science was booming, especially these courses saw a tremendous subscription rate. People also started registering for classes on ‘How to speak and write English better?

unacademy app

Recently, the official app for Unacademy was released. Unacademy Plus was the premium version that was launched in the app. This gave out more personalized services and kept track of the students learning and scores.

Unacademy is one of the top online learning platforms. The fact that it is reaching out to most of the people is mind-blowing. Many people will benefit from the courses given out by Unacademy.

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