Edtech unicorn Unacademy Co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal took to Twitter to announce the launch of the startup's new subscription, Unacademy Icons.
According to its website, Unacademy Icons will bring together professionals and experts from different fields to curate lessons on their field of expertise, providing learners from across the country, access and opportunity to learn from them. Gaurav also announced that the first course will be on learning cricket fundamentals from Sachin Tendulkar.
The Unacademy Icons subscription will allow users to have unlimited access to all its courses across categories. As a launch offer, Gaurav tweeted that users can pre-book the subscription for a special price of Rs 299, per user, per year. Later, the subscription can be bought for Rs 999, per user, per year.
Starting with sports, Unacademy Icons will feature courses across sectors-- arts, business and leadership, going ahead.
Startups including Mento, FrontRow, Celebrity School and Artium Academy offer similar courses taught by celebrities in various fields.
Earlier in December, Unacademy co-founder Roman Saini had announced that it was focusing on aggressively building its presence across new categories, and on expanding overseas.
Founded in 2015 by Gaurav, Roman and Hemesh Singh, Unacademy has more than 60,000 educators registered on its platform, boosting of more than seven lakh subscribers, and offering courses in 14 different Indian languages. The Bengaluru-based edtech giant is backed by marquee investors including SoftBank, General Atlantic and Tiger Global, and had raised about $440 million in August last year, at a valuation of $3.44 billion.
Additionally, Unacademy has been on an aggressive acquiring phase. It recently acquired online tuition-focused platform Swiflearn. Earlier Unacademy had acquired Wifistudy, Kreatryx, CodeChef, Prepladder, Mastree, Coirsavy, NeoStencil, TapChief, and Handa Ka Funda. With the mission of democratising creation and distribution channels, Unacademy wishes to become the largest consumer brand in the country by 2025.
According to media reports, rumours are that Unacademy plans to launch offline experience centres, called 'Unacademy Stores' in the near future, to provide a walk-in experience for its users.
Edited by Anju Narayanan