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Unacademy Announces Successful Funding Round
By Cait Etherington
July 26, 2018
Edtech companies continue to expand around the world and India is no exception. With India’s large population of people under 35 and estimated 500 million Internet users, it is no surprise that edtech is a growth industry. Last week, one of India’s major edtech players, Bangalore-based Unacademy, announced that it had just closed a Series C funding round worth more than $20 million. Earlier this year, Unacademy raised $11.5 million in a round led by Sequoia India.
As co-founder and CEO, Gaurav Munjal, stated in a news release issued last week at the time of Unacademy’s funding announcement, “Right from the outset, we have focused on growing the platform by empowering the best educators. We have grown tremendously since our inception, and just last month, more than 3000 educators were active on the platform and lessons created by them were watched more than 40 million times by learners.” Munjal also said, “I am thankful to our existing investors for infusing Unacademy with growth capital and reaffirming their faith in us. We will utilise these funds to invest heavily in our product and technology to make Unacademy one of the best global internet products out of India. We remain committed to growing our platform with more educators, learners and categories.”
Unacademy’s History
Unacademy originally launched as a YouTube channel nearly a decade ago. Over time, the channel evolved and in 2015, Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh officially founded their company. Since then, the startup has raised close to $40 million. Although Unacademy does offer courses, it is best known as a test prep platform.
Clearly, funders are not only watching Unacademy but also feeling confident about its future potential for growth. As Alok Goel of SAIF, one of the investment firms that supported Unacademy in its most recent funding round, said in a media release issued last week, “Unacademy has demonstrated tremendous progress towards their goal of delivering personalized learning by connecting great quality educators and students on their platform. The company has diversified across several new domains and has achieved amazing word of mouth among learners.” Shailendra Singh, Managing Director, Sequoia India agrees: “Gaurav, Roman and Hemesh are driven founders with a very focused mission, and that is having a clear effect on the pace of production innovation, team building and overall growth.”
Backing for Edtech Companies in India
A recent article in The Economic Times, a financial publication based in India, reports, “online education industry in India is poised to grow eight times to become a $1.96 billion industry by 2021 as an increasing number of students consume content through e-routes.” Of course, Unacademy is not alone in this growing market. Other major players in India’s edtech market include BYJU‘s, which is one of the most valuable edtech company’s in the world.
“As bots enter the classroom, both teachers and learners will have to reflect on their uses and outcomes. They will need to adopt an awareness of AI’s presence. Teachers must recognize AI’s short comings, such as inherently developing biases and its inability to process human emotions.”
This statement is correct as it relates to AI, generally; however, it assumes that AI exists as THE entity that students directly interact with. There are many potential expressions of AI, including a human-in-the-loop approach, in which it is configured in such as way as to facilitate dialogs and interactions between people, either studentteacher or studentstudent.
For example, we’re building an L2 language speaking practice app (Language Hero Smart Chat). We use AI to enable beginning students, who speak different languages, to have natural, real life conversations in each other’s language from Day 1. They speak directly to each other, interacting with the system only to select from multiple content choices suggested by it, designed to facilitate a real free-ranging dialog resulting in real bonding, to the extent it’s possible, rather than to practice a particular lexical structure (they can also text or go off the grid to have pure video chat).
Teachers can use this system as well for group chat. They can upload their own curriculum as well (the Smart Chat system configures it as multiple vector (branching script) chat or merges it with the system curriculum (focused on real life useful topics like travel, food, shopping, social chat, expressing ideas, etc.). Everything they say is comprehensible to their students, and so are all student responses.
When such a system is implemented in a manner that pays particular attention to the affective components that make human interaction so effective for creating the desire to learn (and corresponding openness to processing L2 content, in this case), we think it can be a more effective tool than bot chat.