Phani Sama

I’m thrilled to announce we’ve raised $44M to build a new home for product design. Meet @noondesign. No workflow is more broken and fragmented in 2026 than the product designers’. The very same people who care most about building software don’t have software purpose built for them. @kushagrasinha7 and I have lived this problem first hand as designers ourselves. That’s why we built Noon. The first product design tool that works entirely on your product code, so you can design not only how a product looks, but also how it works. With AI at its core that works in seconds, not minutes. For the first time, you can create, iterate, build, test and ship. All in one canvas. No translations or roundtrips to the codebase and back. Comment “Get Noon” and we’ll get you on the list for early access.

@abezack Awesome, Abey!

Aule Space has been awarded non-dilutive funding under the ELEVATE Program. We are grateful for the @governmentofkar's support and were honoured to receive the felicitation from @PriyankKharge, Hon’ble Minister for Electronics, IT BT Department, Karnataka.

The phrase “venture” capital came from “adventure” capital, a term used by investor John Hay Whitney in the 1940s who was annoyed that his firm was called a “private investment bank” in the New York Times. He wanted a more risk-on phrase. ~ from “Power Law” by Sebastian Mallaby

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.

@harshjain85 All the best, @harshjain85 . This is inspiring!

We were 22 yrs old in 2008 when we started with a simple Dream – to Make Sports Better - from a small office in Lower Parel, Mumbai. Since then, it’s been a wild ride, filled with incredible wins, some tough losses, and moments that tested all our resilience. Through it all, one thing stayed constant: our passion to build something that helps make every sports match more exciting. It’s time to go back to where it all began. In Jan 2026, we’re moving from BKC back to Worli – into our new Dream Sports Stadium (office). This move isn’t just about a new space given our focus on cost optimisation. It’s a return to our roots. A reminder to stay lean, frugal, hungry, and laser-focused on building the next big thing from India for the world. With every Dream Sports brand (@Dream11, @FanCode, @DreamSetGo_Com, @dreamcricketapp, Dream Money, Dream Play, Dream Sports AI, @TheDFOfficial and a few more launching soon!) now under one roof, we’ll collaborate better, move faster, and operate smarter 🏆❤️ #CantStopWontStop

Soft launch : Global, instant, cost-efficient education verification using @reclaimprotocol We've been working on a full stack solution where you can plug and play an SDK to verify which of the 14k global universities a user is enrolled in. 🧵

Inspired by what my BITS Pilani juniors are working on at Aule Space . A satellite that will repair and refuel other satellites... in SPACE! #BITSPilani All the best @intothejaytrix 🚀

@AuleSpace Inspiring!

I had an early access to this and loved it!

I am proud to unveil the #IndiaSaaSAnthem, a humble tribute to our #SaaS heroes who have been setting benchmarks globally. Wherever you go, whatever you accomplish, there's always a home waiting to celebrate your story. A home that gives abundantly more than what it receives. We're SaaSBoomi - The Home of #IndiaSaaS. 🧡🤍💚

Highlights from an Exceptional Panel Discussion of Keynote on Ruralyaan: Futur-Proofing with Sustainability! #dd #developmentdialogue #sustainability #Ruralyaan #Nizamabad #kakatiyasandbox

I’m excited to share that @llama has raised $6m in funding from @foundersfund, @ElectricCapital, @eladgil + others to bring an enterprise-grade UX to smart contract access management twitter.com/llama/status/1…

Introducing Llama: an access control and governance platform for smart contracts. We've contributed to leading protocols & used our learnings to build the product we wish we had. We raised $6M from Founders Fund & Electric Capital to secure the next generation of protocols.

We've met many operators, students & executives who are on the edge of starting up. They may have an idea, or an insight, which can lead to something great. But don't know where to begin. It's what we now call the -1 to 0 stage. Best articulated here 👇 twitter.com/rsanghvi/statu…

Where's the misinformation? The letter is clear. Network usage fees, or if you call it "fair share", violates net neutrality, if it imposes fees on one class of startups or startups that have high traffic. Btw, @MuntazirAbbas , I'd be happy to respond to this, as someone +

🗣️ Calling all student entrepreneurs in India! 🇮🇳 AWS and Campus Fund are back with the 4th edition of Grand Challenge! Bring your innovations and ideas, and beat the competition to be crowned India’s Best Student-Led Startup 2023. 🥇 Apply now! go.aws/3PnT2Uj

@phanisama @lessin Been enjoying Ketchup Live for this apps.apple.com/us/app/ketchup… first mvp built on WhatsApp of course :)

@adrianalbus @Presidentlin @lessin Checkout ketchup.live. Just launched!

@Presidentlin @lessin Free, since users will be needed to build the network. Then introduce premium features

Request for Product: Free to Talk (FTT)

@zachcoelius @lessin Checkout ketchup.live. Just launched!

@lessin I want this