Archit Nanda

Co-Founder - @knotnow_co | ex-@unacademy | IIT Bombay '21

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

KNOT's Sale in now live!🚀

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

@BadCapitalVC 👋🏼

[Gaurav Munjal @gauravmunjal]

Unacademy and upGrad have signed a term sheet for upGrad to acquire Unacademy in a 100% share swap deal.

Neither side will disclose the valuation until closing, when the papers are filed and the transaction becomes public.

In the last one year, a lot has happened at Unacademy:

- We consolidated company operated centres with franchise partners so we could refocus on what we do best, building great online education products
- We completed a ₹50 crore ESOP buyback and nearly 40% of former employees have already participated
- Airlearn, our first global product, is gaining meaningful traction in the US, UK, Germany and Canada
- Our Cash Reserves as of today are more than $100M

I will be staying back as Co-Founder and CEO Unacademy - with the Goal to build Great Online Products for Learners in India and Globally.

Unacademy helped invent the Modern EdTech Playbook. Along the way we lost some focus and market share, and the sector itself has not seen enough real product innovation in recent years.

AI will fundamentally reshape education, and EdTech may become one of its biggest beneficiaries. The opportunity to reimagine learning products has never been greater.

I have long admired what @RonnieScrewvala and the upGrad team have built. They have quietly but relentlessly established themselves in the upskilling, lifelong learning and higher education space.

If & when we do come together, we share upGrad’s belief that ‘The Whole is bigger than the Sum of Parts’ and altogether we will impact students, learners and working professionals & build great Products from K12 to Forever Learning.

The next chapter for education is only beginning.

[Gaurav Munjal @gauravmunjal]

Airlearn is looking for Product Managers.

Airlearn is the fastest growing Product of Unacademy Group. We are building an AI Learning Product from India for the World. In the last twelve Months, we have grown 10x in terms of Revenue. More than 11M Lessons are being completed on Airlearn every Month with the biggest Markets being US, UK, Canada and Germany. More than 30% of our DAUs have a 100-day Streak on Airlearn.

We started with Language Learning and we are soon launching Courses like English Vocabulary and Chess.

We are looking for Product Managers to join our team who are obsessed about Consumer Products and want to help build a Global Product that helps people get addicted to Learning.

If you are interested in joining the team, email us at [email protected].

[Nishchay @agNishchay]

In 2025, we clocked over a billion transactions..

That’s millions of Indians trusting us with something deeply personal to them, their finance, their trust and their hope..

The first 5 was the foundation.. the real impact will start now..

@misbahspeaks @JarAppHQ

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

Santa delivers in sleighs, we do it in 60 mins!🎄

[Gaurav Munjal @gauravmunjal]

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.

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

@gauravmunjal Such a rare, honest reflection. What a decade, Gaurav!🙌

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

@AkshayiWeb @rachitbansal99 @sun1tha_v @natashamalpani We just came out of college campuses - were building https://t.co/EPnrneRQ65 before pivoting :p

Nonetheless I’ll check it out

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

🙌🏼12 months ago, we shut down what was “working” - a social app with 2.5M users

And we rebuilt from scratch. New category, new muscle, new fear

Thrilled to share that we’ve raised $5M to accelerate our mission of instant fashion🚀

Excited to partner with 12 Flags who join us with this round, with participation from existing investors @KaeCapital and @theboundlessvc

To every customer who said “thank god this exists” - we heard you

To our investors who backed the crazy vision - thank you

To the team that sprinted through every midnight - onward

Instant fashion is just about to get fashionable!💕

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

🙌🏼12 months ago, we shut down what was “working” - a social app with 2.5M users

And we rebuilt from scratch. New category, new muscle, new fear

Thrilled to share that we’ve raised $5M to accelerate our mission of instant fashion🚀

Excited to partner with 12 Flags who join us with this round, with participation from existing investors @KaeCapital and @theboundlessvc

To every customer who said “thank god this exists” - we heard you

To our investors who backed the crazy vision - thank you

To the team that sprinted through every midnight - onward

Instant fashion is just about to get fashionable!💕

[Nikhil Kamath @nikhilkamathcio]

Caption this

@elonmusk

[Gaurav Munjal @gauravmunjal]

In 2015, as a 25 year old kid who had just started Unacademy. I sent an email to @deepigoyal. He replied back by saying “Kyon milna hai yaar. Dhandha banao.”

I didn’t give up. I kept mailing him every week. And finally he did agree for a 15m Meeting (after months of chasing him). He was in a bad mood that day, so he met me just for 10m but gave me an advice that stayed with me.

“Just grow 1% everyday. Everything else is secondary.”

But then over the years, I met him many times and was lucky to have him as a Mentor.

I urge everyone to read this Book. The stories that I heard from Deepinder, and the advice I got over the years, changed my Life. Time for the same stories, to change yours.

[Mahika Jadhav @mahikaa101]

Bribed the tech guy to give me a 17K worth KNOT cash coupon💰
Stay tuned to see my shopping cart 😭✨

[KNOT @knotnow_co]

When we launched KNOT, none of us knew much about fashion.
Now the office looks like this every day ✨

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

the only thrill is executing well and hiring right, everything else is a rounding error over time

[KNOT @knotnow_co]

Because we don’t use it as an excuse 👀

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

@Himank_jain1 @almostpaddy Sharing my account details on DM

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

@AarihantAaryan @grok That was before 24 hrs were over, grok seems stupid atp

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

. @grok pick one like/reply in 24 hours and I’ll send them ₹25K worth of @knotnow_co drip. Accessories included! They should be following the KNOT handle

[Archit Nanda @architnanda_]

@A_rai22 Yea declaring it an epidemic is the only way to fix my deficiencies atp