Education technology platform Unacademy has appointed Directi co-founder and CEO Bhavin Turakhia to its board of directors, it said in a statement.
A serial entrepreneur, Turakhia runs four businesses under the Directi Group: Flock, an enterprise messaging software; Ringo, a telephony service; Zeta, which offers corporate meal vouchers; and Radix, a domain registry business. He also co-founded contextual advertising company Media.net along with brother Divyank Turakhia, which the duo sold to Chinese investors for $900 million.
Turakhia will contribute to Unacademy’s overall business strategy, the statement added.
"Over the years, Bhavin is someone we have always looked up to, and whenever we reached out, he was responsive. We look forward to his mentorship," said Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO, Unacademy.
Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which runs Unacademy, raised $4.5 million earlier this year in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. In August 2016, the startup raised $1 million from Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, with Blume Ventures leading the round. Blume also led the company’s $500,000 angel round in May last year.
Unacademy allows educators to create course content on various subjects using an app. It currently has more than 40,000 lessons online. The startup, which began as an educational YouTube channel, launched the free learning platform in January 2016.
India’s online education industry is expected to grow almost eight times to hit $1.96 billion by 2021, with the number of paid users rising six-fold from 1.6 million now to 9.6 million, according to a recent report by Google and consultancy firm KPMG.
By segment, re-skilling and online certification is the largest. In 2016, it was valued at $93 million, and is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38% to reach $463 million by 2021. Primary and secondary education has the largest addressable audience with a student base of around 260 million, making it the second-largest category in 2016. Test preparation, a small segment as of today, is likely to grow at an impressive CAGR of 64%, becoming a $515-million category over four years, the report estimated.
Several ed-tech startups have raised funding over the past one year. Some of the prominent names are Byju's, Cuemath, Simplilearn, Toppr and Tutorvista, among others.
