Nas Academy bags $11m in series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures

Nas Academy, the Singapore-based education platform that caters to the creator economy, has raised US$11 million in its series A round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. 

Other investors in the round include TechAviv Founder Partners, 500 Startups, Graph Ventures, Fresh.fund, and Metapurse, as well as individual investors like ex-Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase president Emilie Choi, and Oyo CEO Ritesh Agrawal.

Markian, a creator with over 10 million followers, and Jellysmack founders Michael Philippe, Robin Sabban and Swann Maizil also participated in the round.

The Nas Academy team with Nuseir Yassin in the center / Photo courtesy: Nas Academy

“The excitement for the creator economy is huge, and the trust in the Nas brand is also good. Those two things have worked well for us,” says Nuseir Yassin, the man behind the popular video channel Nas Daily and the founder of Nas Academy.

“This is the first time in five years that we took VC money because this is the first time we are building technology products,” adds Yassin. The money will also be used to get more trainers on board, he says.

Since its inception last February, the platform has hosted 250 course batches covering topics such as the art of storytelling, building camera presence, and the anatomy of a viral video, among other subjects.

“New media is increasingly dominated by creators, and Nuseir and his team, having been successful creators themselves, are uniquely positioned to enable creators to become educators to teach and monetize their respective crafts,” says Akshay Bhushan, partner at Lightspeed.

Yassin, a Harvard-educated software engineer, started his career as a content creator with the goal of making a one-minute video every day for 1,000 days. Long after he met that goal, he continues to have over 40 million followers across social media platforms.

Now, the Nas brand stands on the intersection of edtech and the creator economy – right where Yassin foresees a “scalable future” for the Nas brand (Nas is Arabic for people).

See more: Nas Daily dreams of hiring 1,000 people for its grand edtech plans

The new funding comes at a time when the Nas company has already announced plans to expand its team to 1,000 people in the next five years, largely recruiting for Nas Academy.

The company is also looking to “aggressively grow and sign up creators country by country,” Yassin told Tech in Asia.

With students from over 110 countries, Nas Academy has enabled well-known content creators to generate millions in revenue, the company claims. These creators include Smile Squad, Dear Alyne, and MingWeiRocks.