[Funding alert] Unacademy raises $440M led by Temasek at $3.4B valuation

Edtech unicorn Unacademy has raised $440 million in a new round of funding led by Singapore's Temasek along with other existing backers like Softbank Vision Fund, General Atlantic, and Tiger Global Management.

The new round will increase the valuation of the startup to $3.44 billion, an increase of 70 percent from $2 billion in December last year.

Unacademy's CEO Gaurav Munjal said Zomato's Deepinder Goyal and OYO's Ritesh Agarwal also participated in this round of funding. They join some of the other top founders and CEOs who have backed the startup in the past, including Flipkart's Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Udaan's Sujeet Kumar.

The funding round also the participation of South Korea's Mirae Asset Management as a new investor.

Munjal, a computer science graduate, founded Unacademy as a YouTube channel in 2010. After getting enough scale, he formally launched the startup in 2015 with Roman Saini, who worked in the Indian Administrative Services, and Hemesh Singh, also a computer science engineer.

In 2020, the edtech space saw a major boom due to the coronavirus-led lockdown as students remained indoors. While BYJU’S, the biggest edtech startup with a $16.5 billion valuation, has been on an acquisition spree, many startups beyond the K-12 segment have also started popping up. 

Online education is projected to grow 6.3X to create a $1.7 billion market, between Class 1 and 12, according to venture capital firm Omidyar Network India and research firm Red Seer’s joint report. The post-K-12 market is expected to grow 3.7X to create a $1.8 billion market. 

Unacademy has also made several acquisitions, including government exam-prep firm WifiStudy, Mastree, which enhances kids' communication skills, and Code Chef, a platform teaching coding to kids.