Unacademy launches 50 new channels to democratise online education

Edtech unicorn Unacademy on Monday evening unveiled a significant step towards its vision of democratising education with 50 new unique education channels. This was revealed at the first edition of the SoftBank-backed company's flagship event ‘Unacademy One’ where the country’s top educators participated. The channels significantly help in increasing accessibility for millions of Learners across academic and non-academic categories. 

Few of these 50 channels are built on the existing content categories as offered by Unacademy. They mark Unacademy’s foray into newer terrains such as ‘Tick Tock Tax’- to simplify the direct and indirect tax concepts, and Life After IIT - a platform to crack JEE and discuss success stories of top rankers.

“We are strengthening our commitment towards democratizing education and presenting a strong content strategy for learners who are seeking knowledge in unique and exciting ways,” said Vivek Sinha, chief operating officer, Unacademy. “Moreover, we are extending our purpose to the larger community and there can be no better occasion than today to share it with everyone.”

The educational channels encompass broad categories such as NEET UG and JEE, UPSC and other post-graduation segments, and bank, SSC and defence. Each channel will have the top educators, curating and creating high-quality content for learners and aspirants pan India. Some of these top educators include Dr. Anand Mani, Namo Kaul, Nishant Vora, Mrunal Patel, Ashish Arora and Mohit Bhargava.

“In terms of where Unacademy is headed, it is all about expansion and growth. That is why we are launching these channels. They are going to be driven by over 250 top educators,” said Karan Shroff, chief marketing officer (CMO) and partner at Unacademy. “Unacademy has more than 200 Youtube channels and we are also targeting regional channels through the new initiative.”

Shroff said that the initiative would also provide learnings from the toppers as well as the students who failed the exams and later succeeded.

Unacademy also said it is partnering with GATE Academy and all GATE aspirants will have access to quality content for the category. Umesh Dhande has joined the Unacademy platform as Vice President, Academics, GATE & ESE. The platform has a network of over 91,000 registered educators and over 99 million learners. It imparts education in over 14 Indian languages to learners across 10,000 cities.

Unacademy recently said that it has been focusing on frugality as its core value. It is focusing on profitability and aims to go public in two years. The founders have taken a salary cut and “certain businesses” are being shut down, according to Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Unacademy Group.

Munjal had said that Unacademy may see a funding dry spell for at least 12-18 months and the company would cut costs to weather the lean period. Earlier this year, the firm laid off more than a thousand employees.

In August, Unacademy raised $440 million in a funding round led by Temasek, with General Atlantic, Tiger Global and Softbank Vision Fund pitching in as other participants. The fundraising took the Unacademy Group’s valuation to $3.44 billion, up from $2 billion in November 2020.