Unacademy is now valued at $1.45 billion after it raised $150M from Softbank and other investors. So we thought we would look at the spectacular rise of Unacademy and its journey towards becoming India's second Ed-tech unicorn
Dec 2010- Gaurav Munjal, a computer science student, launches a YouTube channel named Unacademy.
2014- Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sachin Gupta join the channel as fellow educators.
Jan 2016- Unacademy is officially launched with Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, and Sachin Gupta as co-founders.
May-Aug 2016- Unacademy raises $1.5M in two rounds of seed funding.
Jan 2017- The platform reaches 500K registered users.
Nexus VP and Blume Ventures invest $4.5M through series A funding.
Unacademy’s Learning App becomes the largest free learning platform in India
Oct 2018- Unacademy acquires Wifi Study- a youtube channel for preparations of Govt. exams like banking, SSC, railways, etc.
June 2019- Unacademy raises another $50M in Series D funding.
Feb 2020- Valuation crosses $500M. They raise $110M in Series E led by Facebook.
Mar 2020- They acquire Kreatyx, an online coaching platform for GATE and ESE
Also, announce 20,000 free live classes during COVID lockdown.
Jun 2020- More acquisitions-- CodeChef, a competitive programming website, gets acquired for an undisclosed amount.
July 2020- They also pay $50M to acquire Prepladder, an online medical coaching platform whilst also acquiring a majority stake in Mastree for $5M
Aug 2020- Unacademy becomes one of the Official Partners for IPL
Becomes a Unicorn with a valuation of $1.45 billion
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Rs 50,000 Cr Scam at NSE That Shook Investor Faith
1) For years, India’s National Stock Exchange was a symbol of trust.
Modern. Transparent. Bulletproof.
But in 2015, one of the biggest financial scandals in Indian history quietly began to unravel — the NSE co-location scam.
2) Here’s how it worked:
The NSE had a “co-location” facility. A legit service where brokers could place their trading servers physically close to the exchange’s to get faster data — just a few milliseconds quicker.
But in markets, milliseconds matter. They decide whether you make a profit — or miss the bus.
Now, a handful of brokers allegedly gamed this system.
1) In 2017, Indian telecom was a warzone.
Jio had just entered the market with free data and unlimited calling. Airtel was bleeding, Vodafone and Idea were scrambling to merge, and smaller players were dying a slow death. In the middle of this chaos stood Telenor India — the local arm of Norway’s state-backed telecom giant.
2) Telenor had never quite cracked India. Its spectrum holdings were limited to a few circles, and after years of losses, the company was ready to exit. And that’s when Reliance Jio quietly approached them.
Wadia VS Britannia: How an MNC outsmarted an Indian Tycoon!
1) It started with a biscuit.
In the 1970s, Britannia was a modest, British-controlled company selling biscuits to Indian families. But by the 1980s, the winds of Indianisation were blowing strong, and industrialist Nusli Wadia — heir to the Bombay Dyeing fortune — began sniffing opportunity.
2) He quietly picked up a stake in Britannia through Associated Biscuits International (ABI), a UK-based company that held significant shares in the Indian unit. Wadia acquired ABI’s shares and, by extension, its seat at the Britannia table. His plan was simple: get a toehold, then slowly wrest control.
But there was a problem.
How Naveen Jindal’s Biggest Acquisition Was Erased Overnight
1) In the early 2000s, India’s economy was roaring. Liberalisation had opened the floodgates for private capital, and the government began quietly divesting public-sector assets. Among them were underperforming steel units owned by SAIL (Steel Authority of India Ltd.) — a move that caught the eye of Naveen Jindal, one of the fastest-rising industrialists in the country.
This Rs 91,000 Crore Scam Shook India!
Here's all you need to know!
1) It was India’s Lehman moment.
IL&FS wasn’t some obscure shadow bank. It was a giant. A massive infrastructure lending company that had been around since 1987. It had hundreds of subsidiaries, sovereign wealth fund investors, and one of the highest credit ratings in the business. Everyone believed IL&FS was too big to fail. And then, it did.
2) In 2018, the company defaulted on a series of bond payments. No one saw it coming. Not the investors. Not the rating agencies. Not even the regulators. But behind the scenes, IL&FS had been quietly building a mountain of debt. Over ₹91,000 crore. All hidden behind a web of shell companies and creative accounting.
Why did SEBI take action on Jane Street? Here's all you need to know👇
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Nine out of ten traders in the derivatives market lose money. And if you’ve ever wondered who that elusive one-in-ten winner is, chances are it’s a firm like Jane Street.
Jane Street is a US-based quantitative hedge fund famous for its low-profile, high-return approach to trading. It uses high-frequency algorithms to execute billions of rupees worth of trades in milliseconds. But now, the firm is under the scanner of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).
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SEBI has spent the past few months combing through the firm’s derivatives footprint on India’s National Stock Exchange (NSE).
And they are tracing the last three years of trades to see if outsized options positions on Nifty-50 and Bank Nifty stocks were paired with strategic trades that could have nudged benchmark index values by a few basis points, just enough for a quick arbitrage trade.
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