Unacademy acquires Blume Ventures-backed TapChief

Pandemic has brought a blessing for the on-line education, however, the future can’t be predicted after the pandemic gets over on how many will stick to this model and chances are there to be the hybrid model. Edtech startups have attracted significant investor attention in the past few years, especially in pandemic-ridden 2020, which forced schools, colleges and universities shut.

Online learning company Unacademy said that it is acquiring TapChief, a four-year-old marketplace for gig workers, founded by Shashank Murali, Binay Krishna and Arjun Krishna, TapChief had raised $1.5 million in late 2019 led by Blume Ventures- also an early backer of Unacademy.

According to Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal, colleges don't prepare students for the jobs they will end up at after college, and there is a lot of reliance on colleges to get companies for placements.

Post deal, TapChief was valued of Rs 100 crore, as per a statement. The deal also offered exits to all of TapChief’s existing investors. Further financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The company calls itself a ‘future-of-work’ platform and leverages a host of technology solutions to enable professionals to interact and learn from experts, develop their personal brand and land contracts and projects with businesses. It claims to have over 1,50,000 registered professionals who use the platform to collaborate with experts from their chosen domains and take up short-term professional projects.

“Our endeavour at Unacademy has always been to democratise education and make learning accessible and affordable for everyone. TapChief shares a similar ethos in a different space, as evident from the open community of professionals and learners they’ve created,” Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and CEO of Unacademy, said.

TapChief caters to over 150 enterprise customers across sectors such as education, FMCG, ecommerce, enterprise SaaS and upskilling. According to the company, professionals on the platform have completed over 50,000 gigs.

Unacademy is currently valued at $2 billion, with investors such as SoftBank Group, Tiger Global, General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital. Its valuation has surged by over four times in the past year alone, in large part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has turbocharged online learning.

In the process it has also acquired Mastree, PrepLadder and Coursavy, among others. All these companies operate in various verticals of the online learning space, from civil service exams to K12.

Unacademy, on the other hand, was set up as an educational YouTube channel in 2016 by Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. It helps educators create lessons on the Educator App, which learners access via the Learning App. It has more than 49,000 educators and over 40 million learners across 5,000 cities in 14 languages.