Roman Saini

Co-Founder Unacademy, Airlearn

[Roman Saini @RomanSaini]

What are some Top AI companies being built out of Bangalore? Please tag them.

Would love to meet some iconic founders who are doing cutting edge work in AI.

[Roman Saini @RomanSaini]

India needs 1000s of such deep-tech, hard manufacturing startups. We have to solve many of our structural problems, and the answers will emerge indigenously. Eventually, these same solutions can also be adopted by the world at large.

[Roman Saini @RomanSaini]

I am quite amazed at the deep tech revolution in India. And Bengaluru is right at the center of it!

[Roman Saini @RomanSaini]

Both founders never went to college, are around 20-21, have 0 fear of failure, are good friends, and live near the offices, cut off from the main city. Both also relocated from Mumbai to Bengaluru to increase their odds of success.

[Gaurav Munjal @gauravmunjal]

Sumit is moving on for Unacademy.

Sumit joined us as Co-Founder in 2020 and since then helped us build Graphy and make Offline Profitable.

I have been fortunate to know him since 2013 when CommonFloor acquired Flatchat.

Thank you for everything, Sumit.

[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.

[Roman Saini @RomanSaini]

We just started the 50cr ESOPs buy back for our team members.

This is our way of ensuring that people who helped us build Unacademy are rewarded for their efforts.

Though the valuation is much lower than the last fund raise, still we are trying to do right by our team, in whatever way we can.

Thanks to the Board for creating this Cash Pool so that the team members who were with us in the past can reap some monetary benefits.

More than 25 team members will make 50L+ each.

We are trying to get this done for as many team members as possible and will reach out to all the remaining team members soon.

Always grateful to them for standing with us through thick and thin.

Let’s crack it!

[Roman Saini @RomanSaini]

@arjuns__ @GullyLabs @SaamaOfficial @AshLilani @Zeropearlvc @bipin_28 @gauravmunjal @iRadhikaGupta Congrats @arjuns__ great shoes btw! Really good product. Kill it with @GullyLabs

[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.

[Roman Saini @RomanSaini]

@aakrit Congrats Aakrit. Knowing you and PC well, I’m sure that Activate will be a great success. Glad to know that India is taking great strides towards an AI first future.

[Gaurav Munjal @gauravmunjal]

Happy to announce that @sumjain is now the CEO of our Test Prep Business.

I have known Sumit since 12 years when he was the CEO of CommonFloor and he acquired my first company Flatchat. Sumit joined us as Co-Founder in 2020 has been instrumental in significantly improving the Unit Economics of our Test Prep Business and more importantly the Learner Experience.

Looking forward to many more years of Partnership :)