Unbundling Unacademy

My Zoom Call with Gaurav Munjal, who is in Dubai at the time of this call is 15 minutes late and starts as soon as he finishes one of his investor meetings over Zoom for another fundraise. The pandemic has brought new learning methods even for investors as the edtech market brought an unprecedented change. Valued at $2 Billion in November 2020 in their last investment round, Unacademy is upping the game, as I pen down this story another edtech leader has been declared the most valuable startup in the country making edtech the most efficacious of all. Read on to know what this unicorn can teach you about the changing lesson plan in edtech.

- Punita Sabharwal

Gaurav Munjal is a content creator whose entrepreneurial streak took him to the path of setting up Unacademy. Ever since the age of 15, Munjal was fascinated by blogging and started using online platforms like Blogger and Quora. Talking about his entrepreneurial innings as a teenager, Munjal says, “I was making money through Google AdSense throughout my college by making these blogs, etc.” While pursuing Computer Engineering from NMIMS University, Mumbai, Munjal’s college mates wanted him to come over to their place to explain a topic on Computer Graphics as they had an exam two days later. Instead of commuting there to explain, Munjal made a video, uploaded it on YouTube, and shared it with his friends. For Munjal, YouTube was just another platform like Blogger or Quora. Six months later, he realized that the video has got 1 lakh likes. Talking about his eureka moment, Munjal says, “I wasn’t expecting that because it was a very niche academic topic but people also searched for these topics when preparing for their own examination.” This was the moment Munjal realized that online learning was disruptive.