Bengaluru-based online learning platform Unacademy announced on Tuesday that it has acquired medical exam preparation platform PrepLadder for $50 million (approx Rs 112.3 crore). This marks the strengthening of Unacademy's portfolio in the medical education space and opens up possibilities for more online content for NEET aspirants and MBBS students.
Founded in 2016 by Vitul Goyal, Sahil Goyal and Deepanshu Goyal, Prepladder seeks to train and prepare medical aspirants for exams such as NEET PG, AIIMS PG, NEET SS, and FMGE. "PrepLadder has over 80,000 active subscribers on their platform. They will function out of Chandigarh. We realised that the founders share Unacademy's vision to make quality higher education more accessible and affordable and we decided to get them on board," said CEO and Co-founder of Unacademy, Gaurav Munjal.
Based in Chandigarh, PrepLadder, founded in 2016, is India's largest higher medical education platform and the largest start-up from the city. "In 2018, we bagan collobarating with experts from each of the 19 subjects taught in MBBS and they created content for the platform. But it was in 2019 that we had the breakthrough and the content picked up," said PrepLadder Co-founder Deepanshu Goyal.
Talking about his wish to build a medical college in the future, Goyal said, "We wanted to raise funds and approached several people for that purpose. When we approached Unacademy we didn't look to get acquired but things happened organically." PrepLadder has seen a 500% growth in the last one year and has a daily watch time of 230 minutes per user. "We cover the entire MBBS syllabus and have doctors from over 33 countries learning on the platform," said Deepanshu, "We want to create content that is fit internationally. Unacademy has taught us a lot over the last few months."
Founded in 2015, this is the fifth company acquired by Unacademy. It had earlier acquired Kreatryx, Wifistudy, CodeChef and Graphy. But the intent to acquire PrepLadder isn't to consolidate market share, said Munjal. "Whenever we acquire something, we ensure that they are aligned with the same vision as Unacademy. With PrepLadder, we want to invest more into it and enable it to broaden its market," said Munjal.
The acquisition comes on the heels of news reports that Think and Learn, the parent company of Bengaluru-based edtech unicorn BYJU'S, is in talks to acquire Mumbai-based startup WhiteHat Jr for Rs 300 million.
Unacademy has seen tremendous growth over the last three months owing to the increased focus on online education post-COVID. It has recorded a 100 per cent increase in its paid subscriber base. The monthly watch time minutes has also reached an all-time high of over 1 billion. Additionally, over 525,000 learners attempted various mock tests on the platform for competitive examinations such as UPSC, NEET-PG, and CAT, among others, during this period. Moreover, the platform has seem 10x growth over the last 12 months and now has around 30 million learners. Unacademy is now producing over 20,000 free live classes in over 35 categories every month with a team of over 18,000 educators. "Unacademy's vision is to democratise education and build and enable breakthrough products that reduce the time it takes for a significant change to occur. Disruptive change is inevitable and we are just ensuring that it happens sooner than later," concluded Munjal.
