Co-Founder Unacademy, Airlearn

Bangalore
Joined May 2011
Unacademy is getting acquired by upGrad today. It has been one helluva journey since that stroll in LBSNAA when I was on the phone with @gauravmunjal and decided to quit IAS and build Unacademy. At one point during peak Covid, there were more than 100,000 live classes happening on Unacademy every month, with almost 1M paid subscribers. I remember once I was taking a flight and a CISF officer looked at me curiously and recognised me. He thanked me because he could study online and prepare for his govt. exam while still on the job, and because going to an offline coaching centre was not an option for him. Unacademy has made countless such success stories possible. When we started posting videos on YouTube, very few smart people were teaching online. Being an educator was still looked down upon. I remember that within the first month itself I must have called 200 people to teach online. This led to a revolution bigger than we had imagined. Suddenly we were doing millions of views, which eventually became billions. There are only very few top educators in India today who haven't at some point taught on Unacademy. The impact that Unacademy has created for the ecosystem is immense. The journey wasn't easy. It never is. I remember once being up all night making videos just because our views were down and I didn't want a month where we were not growing. Another time, Gaurav and I flew to China to meet an investor who didn't even show up for the meeting. Whether it's the sleepless nights, or the rejections, or the constant firefighting during good times and bad, it is a journey to remember. Very few people get the opportunity to create the kind of impact that we created. And I am proud of the impact we have created through Unacademy. And now, as a part of upGrad, we are looking forward to creating an even bigger dent in the universe with @RonnieScrewvala. Thanks to my friends and family for always being there for me. Without you it would not have been possible. Especially to my wife @SprihaChoubey and to my co-founder and friend Gaurav, whose LBSNAA phone call helped us create the entire online education category in India.
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Roman Saini retweeted
Six years ago today, Unacademy became a unicorn. Today, Unacademy has closed its acquisition by UpGrad for just over $200M. We raised at a peak, but sold at a fraction of that. I'm not going to dress these facts up. But I am proud of what this team did between those two numbers. When @RomanSaini and I started Unacademy with @hemezh and @sumjain, the mission was to democratise education. We didn't end up capturing all the economic value of that mission. But we changed what online education looks like in this country, and the products we built became the template for the entire sector. Unacademy's free platform created a generation of celebrity educators. Educators are a cornerstone of any economy, and they should be celebrated, and our platform enabled that in our country. Their YouTube videos crossed 10 billion views. That's a milestone I am proud of. Airlearn, in under two years, became one of the top 3 most downloaded language learning apps in the world. We always wanted to build a global consumer product out of India. We did. With a topline of around 400 crores, most businesses profitable or near-profitable, and 900 crores in the bank, we had every option to keep going independently. Nobody was forcing this. But sometimes, you are drawn towards a path that is more exciting than the one that makes you more money. After meeting Ronnie over the years, understanding what he's built with UpGrad in higher education, and getting inspired by his vision for education in India (and more), I always walked away with the thought that it would be fantastic to work with him. And because there was no pressure of running out of money, we could take the time to actually think it through. The more we did, the clearer it got: this is a better path for the ecosystem, not just for us. I'm looking forward to the path ahead, and I am very sure that our shareholders will create immense value from the merger hereon. My heartfelt thanks to every employee who stayed when it would have been easier to leave. To everyone who worked with us in the past. To our educators. To our investors. To my co-founders. We did four ESOP buybacks that created real value for our employees, even though the founders and investors didn't create much for themselves in the process. A special note to a few people without whom I would have personally given up when things got really hard: Shailendra Singh, Deepinder Goyal, Bhavin Turakhia, Sujeet Kumar, Bhavish Aggarwal, Aakrit Vaish, Mukul Arora, Shantanu Rastogi and Karthik Reddy. Also a huge shoutout to family and friends. And most importantly, my wife Reema, and my co-founder and close friend of almost 20 years, Roman. Thanks for sticking around during my lowest and my cockiest moments. You two make me better 馃尀
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Just finished watching the entire podcast of @dougleone with David Senra in one sitting. What an iconic guy. One of the highest signal-to-noise ratio podcasts I've seen in a long time. Gaurav and I had the privilege to meet him a few years ago in the Sequoia office in San Francisco, where he gave us some brutal but needed feedback on Unacademy. Key takeaways from the podcast would be to never rest on the past laurels, always back the Outliers, never be content in life, keep hustling, reinventing oneself to stay relevant at all times and begin with trust.
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Roman Saini retweeted
When we started Airlearn two years ago, we had one goal: to build an Iconic Global Product built from India. As of today: - Around 2M Monthly Downloads without any performance marketing spends, making Airlearn one of the top five downloaded language learning apps globally - 25M Lessons completed every Month - Almost $5M Bookings Run-rate with 110k Active Paid Subscribers - AI Subscription now driving almost 10% of the Bookings - More than 50 Courses now Live on the App including Chess From India to the World 鉂わ笍
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1) Contextual Data is the new oil, and data wars are upon us. 鈦營n 2026, organizations using LLMs for various use cases are firmly caught between a rock and a hard place. It is a proper Catch-22 situation for them. Satya Nadella recently highlighted the same in his article: The Reverse Information Paradox
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5) Data wars will be very big over time. Especially contextual rare data. That is one of the reasons why Local Models will get more prominence with time, as data will become a massive moat for an org if it is not already
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6) So the trust boundaries should be established clearly between the LLM models and the org. Ground rules will have to be redefined and should evolve continuously. Orgs should be able to own this continuous learning curve, switch between various models effortlessly depending upon their training requirements, build their own proprietary learning environments, cordon them off from the competitors, etc. Only then can they become a hill-climbing machine
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Inspired by Founders Fund, we shot a game of Mafia in Bangalore. Here鈥檚 Episode 1 鈽猴笍
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Kushal is really terrible. Terrible at Mafia. But he is a great investor. Episode 1 dropping soon 馃槂
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What are some Top AI companies being built out of Bangalore? Please tag them. Would love to meet some iconic founders who are doing cutting edge work in AI.
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I am quite amazed at the deep tech revolution in India. And Bengaluru is right at the center of it!
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Both founders never went to college, are around 20-21, have 0 fear of failure, are good friends, and live near the offices, cut off from the main city. Both also relocated from Mumbai to Bengaluru to increase their odds of success.
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India needs 1000s of such deep-tech, hard manufacturing startups. We have to solve many of our structural problems, and the answers will emerge indigenously. Eventually, these same solutions can also be adopted by the world at large.
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