Sequoia-backed Unacademy Acquires Hindi YouTube Channel WifiStudy for $10 Mn
Sequoia-backed online education startup Unacademy has acquired acquired WifiStudy, a Jaipur-based YouTube channel, for reportedly $10 million (~ Rs. 73.12 Crores) in order to tap the test preparation market and increase its presence in tier-2 and -3 cities among students who prepare for public recruitment exams including railways and banking.
The deal consists of mostly stock along with cash and post the acquisition, the Youtube channel will continue to operate independently.
Launched in 2014 by Dinesh Godara, WifiStudy channel has about 4.5 million subscribers and it primarily makes videos in Hindi, where the instructor talks about preparations related to exams including Bank PO and RBI.
Interestingly, Unacademy itself was started as a channel on Youtube in 2010 by Gaurav Munjal and then later in 2015, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh joined Gaurav Munjal to found the startup under parent firm – Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd.
Notably, WifiStudy also has a mobile app, which has over 1 million downloads, and a web portal (wifistudy.com) that allows the best exam preparation for SSC, Banking, State/ Central Level, Railway etc. competitive exams. However it is not clear if these are also the part of acquisition or not.
Gaurav Munjal, chief executive of Unacademy, said in a media statement, “With over 4.5 million subscribers and 70 million monthly video views, Wifistudy is one of the largest educational YouTube channels in the world. This acquisition will help us go deeper into the test prep market.”
Unacademy is one of the country’s fastest-growing education start-ups with a network of 5,000 active educators, 5 million learners and over 50,000 courses in more than 10 Indian languages.
In July this year, Unacademy had raised $21 million from Nexus Ventures, SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital India and others. Unacademy has raised a total of $38.6 million in various funding rounds.
Source: IndianWeb2
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