In a bid to further strengthen its inorganic growth, Facebook-backed edtech start-up Unacademy has acquired postgraduate medical entrance exam preparation platform PrepLadder for $50 million. This is the Bengaluru-based company’s third acquisition this year after programming platform Codechef and exam preparation start-up Kreatryx.
However, organic growth will continue to remain the key to the company’s growth strategy, said Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO, Unacademy.
“If we eventually find more people who are building great stuff and they believe in Unacademy’s mission and there is a way to partner together, we will. Our intent is not to drive consolidation in the market,” he said.
Founded in 2016 by a team of three doctors — Deepanshu Goyal, Vitul Goyal, and Sahil Goyal — Chandigarh-based PrepLadder was built with the vision of providing affordable and quality education to students preparing for postgraduate medical entrance exams across the country. It currently has educators teaching over 85,000 active subscribers.
“Our goal is to create a medical college in your pocket. We want to cater to the entire spectrum of healthcare workers and help doctors take better clinical decisions,” said Deepanshu Goyal, Co-Founder, PrepLadder.
The Covid situation in the past three months has added new tailwinds to the edtech sector, with consumer preferences changing rapidly. The segment is expected to reach $3.5 billion in two years from the current $0.7 billion according to Redseer data. According to a Ficci-IAN survey, the interest of investors in edtech start-ups has also gone up from 15 per cent before March to 21 per cent now.
In the past three months since the Covid-19 outbreak, Unacademy has recorded a 100 per cent increase in its paid subscriber base. It held 120,000 live classes during the last month and has 200,000 paid subscribers on the platform currently.
Source: Business-Standard