When American VC Lightspeed Venture Partners leads a US$11 million US$11 million Nas Academy Nas Academy Raises $11 Million Series A to Continue Building The World’s First Platform for Creator Academies Read more Series A funding round for a platform that teaches creators *how to be successful online*, you know something significant is cooking. The Singapore-based platform Nas Academy, which raised the round in July 2021, is the brainchild of Nuseir Yassin—you probably know him as the popular YouTuber Nas Daily.

Nas Daily has more than 40 million followers across online channels, including 20 million on its main Facebook page and over four million on YouTube. The 29-year-old Israel-born founder is worth around US$5 million, according to a Nas Academy post post Nas Academy Nas Daily’s Net Worth: How Much Money Can You Make From a 1-Minute Video? Read more .

Yassin has clearly seen success in being a global influencer. And since last year, he’s been busy putting together a band of young, successful influencers like him to show digital aspirants how it’s done.

At Nas Academy, you can pay US$49 to learn the tricks of Yassin’s trade. Or seek business building tips from Ritesh Agarwal, India’s second-youngest billionaire and the founder of US$10 billion-valued startup OYO. There are 14 such courses on offer right now, with 30 registered creators—the company is actively finding more creators to beef up its courses. (Agarwal is an investor in Nas Academy.)

In today’s digital world, experiences and learned skills are often not taught in classrooms, and anyone with them is qualified to teach. Or so Yassin believes. He likens his project to a more accessible form of Harvard—the prestigious US university and one of the world’s best—where he graduated from.

“We’re trying to decentralise education. If you want to become a university, you don’t need a building, tables and chairs—and you don’t need to suffer with marketing. You can build your own university on our marketplace,” he tells The Ken.

Rapid rise

Yassin quit his job as an engineer with New York-based payment startup Venmo to travel the world in 2016, starting a Facebook page to document the experience through one-minute videos. By 2018, he had found himself in a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which saw his videos upgraded to ‘show’ status.

That’s a lofty goal, and to try and achieve it, Nas Academy is hunkering down on its strengths—courses that are closely aligned with the creator economy, a category Yassin firmly fits into.

The Nas Academy business “falls at the intersection” of trends—including the rise of virtual learning, a lessening focus on formalised education, and of course, the growth of online influencers—says Akshay Bhushan, a Singapore-based partner at Lightspeed.