Startup story of Unacademy |Inspiring Indian Startup Story
Unacademy, one of India’s largest learning platforms. It is an online portal which provides free and paid educational content to civil service candidates. It also provides courses for competitive examinations like SSC, Banking, GATE, CAT, JEE and many more.
Within 6 months, it benefitted over 300,000 students from over 2,400 online lessons. They received detailed courses on cracking various competitive examinations, on this platform.
Rise of Unacademy
Unacademy is run by Sorting Hat Technologies. It was initially begun as a YouTube channel in 2010. Launched by Gaurav Munjal, it offered free education. Later Hemesh Singh and Roman Saini joined along with him. Gradually, it started live classes only for paid users. It also coached for examinations like UPSC and CAT.
Unacademy was officially founded in 2015. Only after a year of its founding it raised substantial funds. The key investors of Unacademy are Facebook, Flipkart, General Atlantic, Paytm, and Sequoia. All three of the founders got featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 india.
Today, Unacademy offers over 2500 lessons with around 250 million views on its YouTube videos. It has benefitted more than 300,000 students. During the pandemic they launched 20,000 free live classes.
The Brains Behind the Idea
Roman Saini, a 31 year old man is the co-founder of Unacademy. He was born in Kotputli town Jaipur, Rajasthan. At the age of 16, he cleared the AIIMS entrance exam. He went to publish a research paper in a reputed medical journal before the age of 18. After accomplishing his MBBS, he worked as a junior resident at NDDTC in Psychiatry. But he resigned within 6 months.
At the age of 23, he passed the Civil Services examination in his first attempt. He resigned before the formal completion of his training in 2016. His dream was something else. He was also appointed as a collector in Madhya Pradesh and resigned.
After resigning all these posts he began his own entrepreneurial venture and named it Unacademy. He devoted more of his time for his educational mission. Saini spent at least 13-14 hours per day working actively on developing Unacademy. He left hardly any time for friends, family, exercise and other activities. His aim was to make Unacademy the biggest ed-tech company in India. He says that in order to succeed the first thing you need is to learn how to learn. Before taking up a challenge, you need to train for the challenge.
In 2018, Roman Saini got 4th place in Forbes India 30 under 30.
“I could relate to the problems faced by millions of students in India who don’t get high-quality and affordable education, since at one point I had to take a loan from a friend to pay the coaching center fee. Unacademy is trying to bridge the gap. It was a chance to work with an awesome team and the final push came from Gaurav-he can be very convincing when he wants to.” Said Saini.
Gaurav Munjal
Founder and Ceo of Flatchat and co-founder and educator at Unacademy. He is also an author at YourStory. He began his journey while he was a student of engineering in Mumbai, in December 2010. Munjal added a short video about computer graphics on YouTube. He had introduced a channel called Unacademy on the video sharing platform through which his friends could access the tutorial. Heartened by the positive, he started uploading more tutorials related to computer programming. This went on progress even after he started his work as a software engineer at Directi.
Eventually he set up his first company Flat.to in 2013. He then sold his company to the common floor a year later.during the time, Munjal, a resident of Jaipur, brought in his friend Roman Saini to upload tutorials on how to pass the civil services exam on the channel. In 2015 he resigned his job and joined Sorting Hat Technologies. In September 2015, Gaurav had set up Sorting Hat Technologies with Hemesh Singh. The company owns and operates Unacademy. It is a digital education platform comprising a mobile app, a web portal and a YouTube channel.
Hemash Singh
Hemash Singh is the co-founder and CTO of Unacademy and CTO Flatchat. It was when one of his friends who was an excellent coder got occupied in Facebook US. His mind was completely directed to competitive programming. He roped up with his friends and began practicing CodeChef, TopCoder and SPOJ. This gave them excellent results and they stood second from India in IIT-K ICPC, 7th in ACM-ICPC-SAARC. After completing his college Hemesh met Gaurav Munjal, through a mutual friend and began working on Flat.to. He was building the first version of the platform and became the first employee of the company. Thinking about the future Hemesh says he is looking forward to working on his own startup sometime.
