dharmendra

Unacademy turns 10 today I thought it's a good occasion to jot down some thoughts on this day about the wild ride that we have gone through. Ten years ago, we started with a simple mission: to empower great educators and make their content accessible to everyone. This is when the company was started. Unacademy started as a YouTube channel in 2010, 15 years ago. When I was in the 3rd year of my college. And I started making videos on computer science to help my friends. It continued as a side project with @RomanSaini joining in 2014, and us blitzscaling the YouTube channel. His UPSC videos would get millions of views that helped us in becoming the number one education channel in the country. We thought that the biggest problem then was that the smartest people are not teaching, and we need a platform where we'll get the best educators who'll create videos for learners for free. Kind of like what Twitch had done to gaming, we wanted to do that to education. Create a YouTube-like platform. And on 10th December 2015, Unacademy was launched. For the first four years, we kept adding more and more great educators to the platform, which would lead to millions of learners joining the platform. There was a point in 2018 when we were doing millions of views per month on our own platform, with Unacademy being the number one education app on the Play Store. And it was all organic growth, because we had a rule to not spend money on performance marketing. These were exciting times. Roman would personally go to the houses of potential educators to convince them to start teaching on an Unacademy. That's how some of the best educators joined the platform. From the beginning, we always thought of ourselves as a tech company operating in education. Unlike every other player in the market which behaved like an education company using tech to enable them. That's why we had features like streaks, knowledge hats, and a lot of gamification built in for educators and learners. Educators would get massively addicted to the knowledge hats which the learners would gift them on crossing certain milestones. Even till today, some of the biggest educators that we have are the ones who grew on the free platform that we had built as our first product. Then, in 2019, just one year before Covid hit, we launched a subscription product where learners could buy a subscription and get access to live classes from the best educators for their exam. The product was an instant hit. From zero revenue in January 2019 to $1.8M revenue in September 2019, we were one of the fastest growing companies to get to almost $20M Bookings ARR in nine months. The next one year was crazy because our revenue kept scaling and especially post-Covid, we were growing even faster. Almost 1M Paid Subscribers were now enrolled on Unacademy. There were three back-to-back funding rounds. From being a $100M valuation at the start of 2019, we were at a $1.5B valuation by September 2020. We had spent less than $50M to reach a valuation of $1.5B. But soon the distractions began. In the next few months, we did another round, ended up raising another $440 million. Totalling the fund raise to more than $700 million in just less than two years. We thought that what we are seeing in COVID would sustain forever and that's the new reality. And started burning a lot of money to acquire a lot of market share, without realizing that education business is slightly different from a normal tech business, and here your first transaction is basically your LTV. We had become the number one test prep brand in terms of recall. We were the number one test prep player in terms of online business, which had scaled to almost $100M in revenue.

A newly wed techie couple forced to attend their own reception online after their Indigo flights from Bhubaneswar-Hubbali were cancelled. The bride’s parents having already invited relatives decided to broadcast their live feed on a big screen. #IndigoDelay #FlightCancellations

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🎉 Congratulations DMA @rupeeflo for being a finalist in the Fintech Startup of the Year category at IFTA 2025! Join us to celebrate the brightest minds in fintech. 📅 10 Dec 2025 | 📍 Aurika, Mumbai @itsdharmendra08 #IFTA2025 #Fintech #Innovation

The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership: aka.ms/AAyczj7