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India’s Unacademy raises $50 million to grow its online learning platform
Big money continues to flow in India’s growing education market. Bangalore-based Unacademy, which operates an online learning platform to help millions prepare for competitive exams in India, has raised $50 million to further scale its reach.
The Series D financing round was led by Steadview Capital, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures, with Unacademy’s own co-founders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini also participating in it. The new round means the startup has raised close to $90 million to date.
The four-year-old startup is aimed at students who are preparing for competitive exams to get into a college and those who are pursuing graduation-level courses. Unacademy allows students to watch live classes from educators and later engage in sessions to review topics in more detail. It has 10,000 registered educators and 13 million learners — up from 3 million a year ago.
The startup said it will use the new fund to expand the number of educators it has on the platform, and also add more exam courses, Unacademy CEO Munjal told TechCrunch. It will also improve its product and expand the team.
Unacademy began its journey as a YouTube channel, but has since expanded to its own app where it offers some courses for free and others through a recently launched subscription business. The subscription service — called Unacademy Plus Subscription — has 50,000 users.
Unacademy also maintains an archive of all the classes, giving students the option to reference older lectures at any time through the app. The startup says YouTube is still its largest distribution channel. Overall, the platform sees more than 100 million monthly views across the platforms.
“We are seeing unprecedented growth and engagement from learners in smaller towns and cities, and are also very humbled to see that top-quality educators are choosing Unacademy as their primary platform to reach out to students. In the last few months, we have taken bigger strides toward achieving this mission. We have more than 400 top educators from across the country taking live classes every day on Unacademy Plus. This is available to every student, irrespective of their location,” said Munjal.
Unacademy competes with unicorn Byju’s, which is widely believed to be the largest edtech startup in the world with its valuation nearing $4 billion. Byju’s, which has more than 2.4 million paid subscribers (and over 30 million users), offers courses for students in kindergarten to year 12, in addition to those preparing for competitive under graduation level courses.
India has the largest population in the world in the age bracket of 5 to 24 years. The education space in the nation is estimated to grow to $35 billion in the next six years.
In recent months, Unacademy has grown more aggressive with marketing. Last year it tied up with web-production house The Viral Fever to fund a show called “Kota Factory,” which revolves around the lives of students who are preparing to go to an engineering college. In the midst of it, Unacademy also offered low-cost, discounted subscription plans to attract users to its subscription platform.
Unacademy has presence in Indonesia as well, where as of last year, it had about 30 educators. The startup did not offer an update on how its international ambitions are holding up. A representative of Unacademy told TechCrunch recently that the platform does not rely on ads for monetization.
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Postman raises $50 million to grow its API development platform
Postman, a five-year-old startup that is attempting to simplify development, tests and management of APIs through its platform, has raised $50 million in a new round to scale its business.
The Series B for the startup, which began its journey in India, was led by CRV and included participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners . The startup, with offices in India and San Francisco, closed its Series A financing round four years ago and has raised $58 million to date.
Postman offers a development environment which a developer or a firm could use to build, publish, document, design, monitor, test and debug their APIs. Postman, like some other startups such as RapidAPI, also maintains a marketplace to offer APIs for quick integration with other popular services.
The startup was co-founded by Abhinav Asthana, a former intern at Yahoo . Asthana was frustrated with how APIs were an afterthought for many developers, as they usually got around to building them in the eleventh hour. Additionally, developers were relying on their own workflows and there was no organized platform that could be used by many, he explained in an interview with TechCrunch.
Even big software firms have not looked into this space yet, and many have instead become a customer of Postman. “We are solving a fundamental problem for the technology landscape. Big companies tend to be slower as they have many other things on their plate,” said Asthana.
Five years later, Postman has grown significantly. More than 7 million users and 300,000 companies, including Microsoft, Twitter, Best Buy, AMC Theaters, PayPal, Shopify, BigCommerce and DocuSign today use Postman’s platform.
The modern software development relies heavily on APIs as more businesses begin to talk with one another. According to research firm Gartner, more than 65% of global infrastructure service providers’ revenue will be generated through services enabled by APIs by 2023, up from 15% in 2018.
Asthana said Postman intends to use the fresh capital to scale its startup, products and grow its team. “We are scaling rapidly across all dimensions. There are many use cases that we still want to address over the coming months. We will also experiment with sales and invest in improving user experience,” he added.
Postman offers some of its services in limited capacity for free to users. For the rest, it charges between $8 to $18 per user to its customers. That’s how the company generates revenue. Asthana declined to share the financial performance of the startup, but said its customer base was “growing phenomenally.”
Postman said CRV general partner Devdutt Yellurkar has joined its board of directors.
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India’s payments firm MobiKwik kick-starts its international ambitions with cross-border mobile top-ups
MobiKwik, a mobile wallet app in India that has expanded to add several financial services in recent years, said today it plans to enter international markets as it approaches profitability with the local operation. The company is kick-starting its overseas ambitions with cross-border mobile top-ups support.
The 10-year-old firm said it has partnered with DT One, a Singapore-headquartered payments network, to enable international mobile recharge (topping up credit to a mobile account), rewards and airtime credit services in more than 150 nations across some 550 mobile operators. The feature is now live on the app.
The feature is aimed at Indians living overseas and immigrants in India, Upasana Taku, co-founder of MobiKwik told TechCrunch in an interview. Millions of Indians go overseas to pursue education or look for a job. Currently, there is no convenient way for them to either help — or receive help from — their families and friends in India when they need to top up their phones.
Similarly, millions of people come to India in search of a job. The new functionality from MobiKwik will allow their families and friends to top up their mobile credit as well. Taku said there is no processing fee for customers, as MobiKwik is absorbing all the overhead expenses.
For MobiKwik, mobile recharge is just the entry point to assess interest from users, Taku added. “This is the first service we are launching. We will eventually add other essential services as well. Mobile recharge will offer us good data points and will help us understand different markets,” she added.
MobiKwik is also studying different regulatory frameworks in overseas markets and holding conversations with stakeholders, she added.
The announcement comes at a time when MobiKwik is inching closer to profitability, a feat unheard of for a mobile wallet app provider in India. The firm, which claims to have grown its revenue by 100% in the last two years, expects to be profitable by this year and go public by 2022. (Interestingly, MobiKwik was looking to raise a big round at $1 billion valuation two years ago — which never happened.)
In the last year, the firm has expanded to offer financial services such as loans, insurance and investment advice. MobiKwik competes with a handful of payment services in India, including Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay that either support, or fully work on top of a government-backed payment infrastructure called UPI. In April, UPI apps were used to carry out 782 million transactions, according to official figures.
The big numbers have attracted major investors, too. With $285.6 million in funding, India emerged as Asia’s top fintech market in the quarter that ended in March this year.
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India’s Bounce raises $72 million to grow its electric scooters business
Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that offers thousands of electric scooters for rent in India, has raised $72 million to accelerate its bid to impact how people navigate India’s traffic-clogged urban areas.
The Series C funding round for the five-year-old startup was led by B Capital — the VC firm founded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin — and Falcon Edge Capital. Chiratae Ventures, Maverick Ventures, Omidyar Network India, Qualcomm Ventures and existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners India also participated in the round.
This new money means that the startup has raised $92 million to date. The current round valued it at more than $200 million, a person familiar with the matter said.
Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, operates in Bangalore. Its app allows users to pick up a scooter and, when their ride is finished, drop it off at any parking spot. It charges customers based on the time and model of electric scooter they choose. An hour-long ride could cost as little as Rs 15 (21 cents). The startup claims it has already clocked two million rides.
Vivekananda Hallekere, co-founder and CEO of Bounce, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup plans to use the fresh capital to add more than 50,000 electric scooters to its fleet by the end of the year, up from its current mix of 5,000 electric and gasoline scooters. Additionally, Bounce, which employs about 200 people, plans to enter more cities in India and invest in growing its tech infrastructure and head count.
“We have about 10 metro and non-metro cities in mind. Starting next quarter, we will start to expand in those cities,” he said. The startup also aims to service one million rides in the next year.
Hallekere said Bounce, which currently offers IoT hardware and design for the scooters, is also working on building its own form factor for scooters.
The rise of Bounce comes as it bets that shared two-wheeler vehicles — already a common mode of transportation in the nation — will play an important role in the future of ridesharing, with electric vehicles replacing petrol ones.
This bet has gained more momentum in recent years. Startups such as Yulu, which partnered with Uber earlier this year to conduct a trial in Bangalore; Vogo, which raised money from Uber rival Ola; and Ather Energy have expanded their businesses and gained the backing of major investors.
Their adoption, though still in their nascent stages, is increasingly proving that for millions of people, rides from Uber and Ola are just too expensive for their wallets. Besides, in jam-packed traffic in Bangalore and Delhi and other cities in India, two wheels are more efficient than four.
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WhatsApp is finally going after outside firms that are abusing its platform
WhatsApp has so far relied on past dealings with bad players within its platform to ramp up its efforts to curtail spam and other automated behavior. The Facebook -owned giant has now announced an additional step it plans to take beginning later this year to improve the health of its messaging service: going after those whose mischievous activities can’t be traced within its platform.
The messaging platform, used by more than 1.5 billion users, confirmed on Tuesday that starting December 7 it will start considering signals off its platform to pursue legal actions against those who are abusing its system. The company will also go after individuals who — or firms that — falsely claim to have found ways to cause havoc on the service.
The move comes as WhatsApp grapples with challenges such as spam behavior to push agendas or spread false information on its messaging service in some markets. “This serves as notice that we will take legal action against companies for which we only have off-platform evidence of abuse if that abuse continues beyond December 7, 2019, or if those companies are linked to on-platform evidence of abuse before that date,” it said in an FAQ post on its site.
A WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed the change to TechCrunch, adding, “WhatsApp was designed for private messaging, so we’ve taken action globally to prevent bulk messaging and enforce limits on how WhatsApp accounts that misuse WhatsApp can be used. We’ve also stepped up our ability to identify abuse, which helps us ban 2 million accounts globally per month.”
Earlier this year, WhatsApp said (PDF) it had built a machine learning system to detect and weed out users who engage in inappropriate behavior, such as sending bulk messages or creating multiple accounts with intention to harm the service. The platform said it was able to assess the past dealings with problematic behaviors to ban 20% of bad accounts at the time of registration itself.
But the platform is still grappling to contain abusive behavior, a Reuters report claimed last month. The news agency reported about tools that were readily being sold in India for less than $15 that claimed to bypass some of the restrictions that WhatsApp introduced in recent months.
TechCrunch understands that with today’s changes, WhatsApp is going after those same set of bad players. It has already started to send cease and desist letters to marketing companies that claim to abuse WhatsApp in recent months, a person familiar with the matter said.
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With iOS 13, Apple delivers new features to court users in India
Apple has finally listened to its small, but slowly growing user base in India. The iPhone-maker today announced a range of features in iOS 13 that are designed to appease users in the world’s second largest smartphone market.
First up, the company says its Siri voice assistant now offers all new and “more natural” Indian English male and female voices. It has also introduced a bilingual keyboard, featuring support for Hindi and English languages. The keyboard offers typing predictions in Devanagari Hindi that can suggest the next word as a user types and it learns from their typing over time.
Additionally, the keyboard in iOS 13 supports all of 22 Indian languages, with the inclusion of 15 new Indian language keyboards: Assamese, Bodo, Dogri, Kashmiri (Devanagari, Arabic), Konkani (Devanagari), Manipuri (Bangla, Meetei Mayek), Maithili, Nepali, Sanskrit, Santali (Devanagari, Ol Chiki), and Sindhi (Devanagari, Arabic).
The addition of these features comes as Apple cautiously grows more serious about India, where it holds about just 1% of the smartphone market share, according to research firm Counterpoint. Even as smartphone shipment is declining in much of the world, India has emerged as the fastest growing market for handsets in recent years. According to Counterpoint, more than 145 million smartphones shipped in India last year, up 10% year-over-year.
But users in India have long complained about Apple services not being fully optimized for local conditions. Siri, for instance, has so far offered limited functionalities in India, and many Apple services such as Apple Pay and Apple News are yet to launch in the nation.
The upcoming version of iOS, which will ship to a range of iPhone handsets later this year, also includes four new system fonts in Indian languages: Gurmukhi, Kannada, Odia, and Gujarati. These will “help deliver greater clarity and ease when reading in apps like Safari, typing in Messages and Mail, or swiping through Contacts,” the company said in a statement.
Additionally, there are 30 new document fonts for Indian languages Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Gurmukhi, Malayalam, Odia, and Urdu.
Apple says iOS 13 will also enable improved video downloading option for patchy networks. It says users in India can now set an optimized time of the day in video streaming apps such as Hotstar and Netflix for downloading videos. Consumption of video apps is increasingly skyrocketing in India. Just last week, Alibaba said it was investing $100 million in its short video app called Vmate in the nation.
In recent months, Apple has also improved Apple Maps in India. Earlier this year, Apple Maps added support for turn-by-turn navigation, and enabled users to book a cab — from Ola or Uber — directly from within the maps app. The company has also been aggressively hiring people to expand its maps and other software teams in the country, according to job postings on the its site.
Improvements to software aside, Apple has also been working to reduce the cost of iPhones in India, the single major factor for their poor sales in the country. Two years ago, Apple started to assemble the iPhone 7 handset in India. It plans to ramp up its local production in the coming weeks, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
As part of local government’s ‘Make in India’ program, phone vendors that assemble phones in the country are offered tax and other benefits. Ravi Shankar Prasad, an Indian minister who oversees law and justice, telecom, and electronics and IT departments, said at a press conference earlier today (local time) that Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party which was reelected last month, will work on expanding Make in India program as one of its top priorities.
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Alibaba pumps $100 million into Vmate to grow its video app in India
Chinese tech giant Alibaba is doubling down on India’s burgeoning video market, looking to fight back local rival ByteDance, Google and Disney to gain its foothold in the nation. The company said today that it is pumping $100 million into Vmate, a three-year-old social video app owned by subsidiary UC Web.
Vmate was launched as a video streaming and short-video-sharing app in 2016. But in the years since, it has added features such as video downloads and 3-dimensional face emojis to expand its use cases. It has amassed 30 million users globally, and will use the capital to scale its business in India, the company told TechCrunch. Alibaba Group did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about its ownership of the app.
The move comes as Alibaba revives its attempts to take on the growing social video apps market, something on which it has missed out completely in China. Vmate could potentially help it fill the gap in India. Many of the features Vmate offers are similar to those offered by ByteDance’s TikTok, which currently has more than 120 million active users in India. ByteDance, with a valuation of about $75 billion, has grown its business without taking money from either Alibaba or Tencent, the latter of which has launched its own TikTok-like apps with limited success.
Alibaba remains one of the biggest global investors in India’s e-commerce and food-tech markets. It has heavily invested in Paytm, BigBasket, Zomato and Snapdeal. It was also supposedly planning to launch a video streaming service in India last year — a rumor that was fueled after it acquired a majority stake in TicketNew, a Chennai-based online ticketing service.
UC Web, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, also counts India as one of its biggest markets. The browser maker has attempted to become a super app in India in recent years by including news and videos. In the last two years, it has been in talks with several bloggers and small publishers to host their articles directly on its platform, many people involved in the project told TechCrunch.
UC Web’s eponymous browser rose to stardom in the days of feature phones, but has since lost the lion’s share to Google Chrome as smartphones become more ubiquitous. Chrome ships as the default browser on most Android smartphones.
The major investment by Alibaba Group also serves as a testament to the growing popularity of video apps in India. Once cautious about each megabyte they spent on the internet, thrifty Indians have become heavy video consumers online as mobile data gets significantly cheaper in the country. Video apps are increasingly climbing up the charts on Google Play Store.
In an event for marketers late last year, YouTube said that India was the only nation where it had more unique users than its parent company Google. The video juggernaut had about 250 million active users in India at the end of 2017. The service, used by more than 2 billion users worldwide, has not revealed its India-specific user base since.
T-Series, the largest record label in India, became the first YouTube channel this week to claim more than 100 million subscribers. What’s even more noteworthy is that T-Series took 10 years to get to its first 10 million subscribers. The additional 90 million subscribers signed up to its channel in the last two years. Also fighting for users’ attention is Hotstar, which is owned by Disney. Earlier this month, it set a new global record for most simultaneous views on a live-streaming event.
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Under-the-radar payments app True Balance just clocked $100M in GMV in India
Away from the limelight of urban cities, where an increasingly growing number of firms are fighting for a piece of India’s digital payments market, a South Korean startup’s app is quietly helping millions of Indians pay digitally and enjoy many financial services for the first time.
The app, called True Balance, began its life as a tool to help users easily find their mobile balance, or topping up pre-pay mobile credit. But in its four-year journey, its ambition has significantly grown beyond that. Today, it serves as a digital wallet app that helps users pay their mobile and electricity bills, and it also lets users pay later.
One thing that has not changed for the parent company of True Balance, BalanceHero, which employs less than 200 people, is its consumer focus. It is strictly catering to people in tier-two and tier-three markets — often dubbed as India 2 and India 3 — who have relatively limited access to the internet, and lower financial power. And it remains operational just in India.
Even as India is already the second largest internet market with more than 500 million users, more than half of its population remains offline. In recent years, the nation has become a battleground for Silicon Valley giants and Chinese firms that are increasingly trying to win existing users and bring the rest of the population online.
And like many other companies, BalanceHero’s bet on India is beginning to pay off. The startup told TechCrunch today that it has clocked $100 million in GMV sales and has amassed about 60 million registered users. Yongsung Yoo, a spokesperson for the startup, added that BalanceHero, which has raised $42 million to date, is also nearing profitability.
The South Korean firm’s playbook is different from many other players that are racing to claim a slice of India’s burgeoning digital payments market. True Balance competes with the likes of Paytm, MobiKwik, Google, Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart, though its competitors are still largely catering to the urban parts of India.
In the last two years, many firms have begun to explore smaller cities and towns, but their services are still too out-of-the-world for local residents. Raising awareness about digital services is a big challenge in such markets, Yoo said, so the startup is relying on existing users to help others make their first transactions and in paying bills.
Yoo said the startup rewards these “digital agents” with cash back and other benefits. For these digital agents, many of whom do not have a day job, True Balance has emerged as a side project to make extra money.
Later this year, Yoo said the startup, which recently also added support for UPI in its service, will open an e-commerce store on its app and also offer insurance to users. To accelerate its growth and expansion, True Balance is in the final stages of raising between $50 million to $70 million in a new round that it expects to close in July this year, Yoo said.
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India’s FreshToHome raises $11 million to expand its fish, meat, and vegetable e-commerce platform
Shan Kadavil, who spent early days of his career managing tech support firm Support and then heading India operations of gaming firm Zynga, says he had a calling of sorts when his son was born. Kadavil realized that much of the meat that sells in India is not exactly healthy. The perishables are loaded with chemicals to superficially extend their life by six months, if not more. He wanted to do something better.
Fast forward four years, Kadavil said today that FreshToHome, his new e-commerce startup that delivers “100 percent” pure and fresh fish, chicken, and other kinds of meat, has raised $11 million in Series A funding. The startup has raised $13 million to date.
The round was led by CE Ventures, with participation from Das Capital, Kortschak Investments, TTCER Partners, Al-Nasser Holdings, M&S Partners and other Asia and Valley based Investors. Some of the backers of FreshToHome include Rajan Anandan, the former head of Google Southeast Asia, David Krane, CEO of GV, and Mark Pincus, chairman of Zynga.
FreshToHome has already courted 400,000 customers across four cities — Bengaluru, NCR (Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad & Greater Noida), Chennai and Kerala (Kochi, Trivandrum, Calicut & Trichur) — in India. On the backend, the startup does business with 1,500 fishermen across 125 coasts.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Kadavil said the startup is trying to “Uber-ize farmers and fishmen in India. We are giving them an app — around which we have a US patent — for commodity exchange. What farmers and fishermen do is they bid with us (as mandated by local laws) electronically using the app.” By dealing directly with the source, the startup is eliminating as many as half a dozen middlemen to cut costs.
The startup has built its own supply chain network. “We have got a 1,000 people, 100 trucks, and 40 collection points.” The startup, which also uses trains and planes to move inventory, has become one of the biggest clients of airlines Indigo and SpiceJet, he added. Kadavil claimed that FreshToHome is also the largest e-commerce platform for meat with $1.73 million in GMV sales each month.
If this all sounds well strategized, it is because of the people who are running the show. Kadavil founded the FreshToHome with Mathew Joseph, a veteran in the industry who has dealt with fish export for more than 30 years. Joseph started India’s first e-commerce venture in fish and meat called SeaToHome in 2012.
FreshToHome has also emerged as a micro-VC to farmers where it is doing cooperative farming. In such model, FreshToHome guides farmers to use the latest technologies to produce certain kind of fish. As of today, the startup is seeing 60,000 kg (132,227 pound) of production in cooperative farming through its marketplace and over 400,000 kg (881,849 pound) of total products sold per month.
FreshToHome will use the fresh capital to expand its supply chain network, connect with as many as 8,500 new farmers, and start delivering vegetables. It already delivers vegetables in Bengaluru. Kadavil said the startup will also expand to two more cities — Mumbai and Pune.
FreshToHome will compete with a handful of startups, including Licious, which has raised more than $35 million to date, ZappFresh, and BigBasket, which just earlier this month raised $150 million. The cold-chain market of India is estimated to grow to $37 billion in next five years.
In a prepared statement, Tushar Singhvi, Director of CE Ventures said, “The Meat and Seafood segment in India is pegged to be a 50 billion dollar market, but we have to keep in mind that it’s a highly fragmented industry. FreshToHome.com is not only trying to streamline the industry, they’re also using technology to revolutionize the way the industry functions by disintermediating the supply chain, eliminating the middleman and working directly with the fishermen and farmers in a market place model, to make fresh and chemical free food accessible to the masses at large.”
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Indian PM Narendra Modi’s reelection spells more frustration for US tech giants
Amazon and Walmart’s problems in India look set to continue after Narendra Modi, the biggest force to embrace the country’s politics in decades, led his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to a historic landslide re-election on Thursday, reaffirming his popularity in the eyes of the world’s largest democracy.
The re-election, which gives Modi’s government another five years in power, will in many ways chart the path of India’s burgeoning startup ecosystem, as well as the local play of Silicon Valley companies that have grown increasingly wary of recent policy changes.
At stake is also the future of India’s internet, the second largest in the world. With more than 550 million internet users, the nation has emerged as one of the last great growth markets for Silicon Valley companies. Google, Facebook, and Amazon count India as one of their largest and fastest growing markets. And until late 2016, they enjoyed great dynamics with the Indian government.
But in recent years, New Delhi has ordered more internet shutdowns than ever before and puzzled many over crackdowns on sometimes legitimate websites. To top that, the government recently proposed a law that would require any intermediary — telecom operators, messaging apps, and social media services among others — with more than 5 million users to introduce a number of changes to how they operate in the nation. More on this shortly.
Growing tension
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