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Pakistan edtech startup Maqsad gets $2.1M pre-seed to make education more accessible
Taha Ahmed and Rooshan Aziz left their jobs in strategy consulting and investment banking in London earlier this year in order to found a mobile-only education platform startup, Maqsad, in Pakistan, with a goal “to make education more accessible to 100 million Pakistani students.”
Having grown up in Karachi, childhood friends Ahmed and Aziz are aware of the challenges about the Pakistani education system, which is notably worse for those not living in large urban areas (the nation’s student-teacher ratio is 44:1). Pakistani children are less likely to go to school for each kilometer of distance between school and their home — with girls being four times affected, Maqsad co-founder Aziz said.
Maqsad announced today its $2.1 million pre-seed round to enhance its content platform growth and invest in R&D.
The pre-seed round, which was completed in just three weeks via virtual meetings, was led by Indus Valley Capital, with participation from Alter Global, Fatima Gobi Ventures and several angel investors from Pakistan, the Middle East and Europe.
Maqsad will use the proceeds for developing in-house content, such as production studio, academics and animators, as well as bolstering R&D and engineering, Aziz told TechCrunch. The company will focus on the K-12 education in Pakistan, including 11th and 12th grade math, with plans to expand into other STEM subjects for the next one-two years, Aziz said.
Maqsad’s platform, which provides a one-stop shop for after-school academic content in a mix of English and Urdu, will be supplemented by quizzes and other gamified features that will come together to offer a personalized education to individuals. Its platform features include adaptive testing that alter a question’s level of difficulty depending on users’ responses, Aziz explained.
The word “maqsad” means purpose in Urdu.
“We believe everyone has a purpose. Maqsad’s mission is to enable Pakistani students to realize this purpose; whether you are a student from an urban centre, such as Lahore, or from a remote village in Sindh: Maqsad believes in equal opportunity for all,” Aziz said.
“We are building a mobile-first platform, given that 95% of broadband users in Pakistan are via mobile. Most other platforms are not mobile optimized,” Aziz added.
“It’s about more than just getting students to pass their exams. We want to start a revolution in the way Pakistani students learn, moving beyond rote memorization to a place of real comprehension,” said co-founder Taha Ahmed, who was a former strategy consultant at LEK.
The company ran small pilots in April and May and started full-scale operations on 26 July, Aziz said, adding that Maqsad will launch its mobile app, currently under development, in the coming months in Q4 2021 and has a waitlist for early access.
“Struggles of students during the early days of the pandemic motivated us to run a pilot. With promising initial traction and user feedback, the size of the opportunity to digitize the education sector became very clear,” Aziz said.
The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the education industry, heating up the global edtech startups that made online education more accessible for a wider population, for example in countries like India and Indonesia, Aziz mentioned.
The education market size in Pakistan is estimated at $12 billion and is projected to increase to $30 billion by 2030, according to Aziz.
It plans to build the company as a hybrid center offering online and offline courses like Byju’s and Aakash, and expand classes for adults such as MasterClass, the U.S.-based online classes for adults, as its long-term plans, Aziz said.
“Maqsad founders’ deep understanding of the problem, unique approach to solving it and passion for impact persuaded us quickly,” the founder and managing partner of Indus Valley Capital, Aatif Awan, said.
“Pakistan’s edtech opportunity is one of the largest in the world and we are excited to back Maqsad in delivering tech-powered education that levels access, quality and across Pakistan’s youth and creates lasting social change,” Ali Mukhtar, general partner of Fatima Gobi Ventures said.
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What we can learn from edtech startups’ expansion efforts in Europe
It’s a story common to all sectors today: investors only want to see ‘uppy-righty’ charts in a pitch. However, edtech growth in the past 18 months has ramped up to such an extent that companies need to be presenting 3x+ growth in annual recurring revenue to even get noticed by their favored funds.
Some companies are able to blast this out of the park — like GoStudent, Ornikar and YouSchool — but others, arguably less suited to the conditions presented by the pandemic, have found it more difficult to present this kind of growth.
One of the most common themes Brighteye sees in young companies is an emphasis on international expansion for growth. To get some additional insight into this trend, we surveyed edtech firms on their expansion plans, priorities and pitfalls. We received 57 responses and supplemented it with interviews of leading companies and investors. Europe is home 49 of the surveyed companies, six are based in the U.S., and three in Asia.
Going international later in the journey or when more funding is available, possibly due to a VC round, seems to make facets of expansion more feasible. Higher budgets also enable entry to several markets nearly simultaneously.
The survey revealed a roughly even split of target customers across companies, institutions and consumers, as well as a good spread of home markets. The largest contingents were from the U.K. and France, with 13 and nine respondents respectively, followed by the U.S. with seven, Norway with five, and Spain, Finland, and Switzerland with four each. About 40% of these firms were yet to foray beyond their home country and the rest had gone international.
International expansion is an interesting and nuanced part of the growth path of an edtech firm. Unlike their neighbors in fintech, it’s assumed that edtech companies need to expand to a number of big markets in order to reach a scale that makes them attractive to VCs. This is less true than it was in early 2020, as digital education and work is now so commonplace that it’s possible to build a billion-dollar edtech in a single, larger European market.
But naturally, nearly every ambitious edtech founder realizes they need to expand overseas to grow at a pace that is attractive to investors. They have good reason to believe that, too: The complexities of selling to schools and universities, for example, are widely documented, so it might seem logical to take your chances and build market share internationally. It follows that some view expansion as a way of diversifying risk — e.g. we are growing nicely in market X, but what if the opportunity in Y is larger and our business begins to decline for some reason in market X?
International expansion sounds good, but what does it mean? We asked a number of organizations this question as part of the survey analysis. The responses were quite broad, and their breadth to an extent reflected their target customer groups and how those customers are reached. If the product is web-based and accessible anywhere, then it’s relatively easy for a company with a good product to reach customers in a large number of markets (50+). The firm can then build teams and wider infrastructure around that traction.
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Quizlet plans for IPO over a year after hitting unicorn status
Quizlet, a flashcard tool turned artificial intelligence-powered tutoring platform, is planning an initial public offering nearly a year after it was valued at $1 billion. According to people familiar with the matter, Quizlet is considerably far along in the process to go public. A recent job filing shows that it is hiring for senior roles to “help build the financial systems and processes as we move towards an IPO.”
In an email to TechCrunch, the San Francisco-based edtech startup declined to comment. Quizlet hasn’t said much about its revenue specifics or if it’s profitable. Last year, the still-private startup claimed it was growing revenue 100% annually. On its website, Quizlet says that it has 60 million monthly learners, up 10 million learners compared to its 2018 totals.
Quizlet has built a large-scale business around simple to share and simple to use products. Its free flashcard maker helps students spin up study guides on topics to prepare for exams. Those insights fuel Quizlet Plus, the startup’s subscription product that charges $47.88 a year for access to more features, including tutoring services.
Quizlet’s tutoring arm, also known as Quizlet Learn, is the company’s most popular offering, per CEO Matthew Glotzbach. As a student goes through the system, Quizlet Learn consistently assesses students to see where they are making mistakes — and where they are making progress.
“It obviously doesn’t yet replace and can’t come anywhere close to replacing a human, but it can provide that guidance and point you in the right direction and help you spend your time in the right places,” he said. “Just even helping you set goals is such a critical step in learning.”
Most recently, Quizlet announced the launch of explanations, a feature that offers a step-by-step solution guide for problem sets from popular textbooks. The feature is “written and verified by experts” and is aimed to help “students better understand the reasoning and thought process behind study questions so they can practice and apply their learnings on their own,” it said in a statement. It also reclaimed the Q from its less fortunate predecessor, amid an entire rebrand.
Quizlet’s quiet march toward the public markets has been slow yet steady. The startup was founded in 2005 by a 15-year-old, Andrew Sutherland. It was fully bootstrapped until 2015. Glotzbach, who was previously an executive at YouTube, then joined in 2016. The startup still doesn’t appear to have a CFO, which is rare for companies that are going public.
Quizlet has raised a majority of its $62 million in venture capital under Glotzbach. Now, investors in the company include General Atlantic, Owl Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and Altos Ventures.
Quizlet’s pursuit of the public markets comes as other edtech companies are proving the market’s reception to the sector. Duolingo, for example, is another consumer-focused education company, albeit one that focuses on one vertical versus Quizlet’s choice to stay broad. Duolingo went public in July, and is currently trading above its open price at $169.75 per share.
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Online learning platform CLASS101 bags $26M Series B to support growth
Everything is switching from offline to online mode, spurred by the pandemic, and that also has turned around things for the creative economy. Creative professionals continue to look for ways to monetize their talents and knowledge through online education platforms like CLASS101 that bring stable incomes and improve opportunities.
CLASS101, a Seoul-based online education platform, announced today it has closed $25.8 million (30 billion won) Series B funding to accelerate its growth in South Korea, the U.S. and Japan.
The Series B round was led by Goodwater Capital, with additional participation from previous backers Strong Ventures, KT Investment, Mirae Asset Capital and Klim Ventures.
In 2019, the company raised a $10.3 million (12 billion won) Series A round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia along with Mirae Asset Venture Investment, KT Investment, Strong Ventures and SpringCamp.
Co-founder and CEO of CLASS101 Monde Ko told TechCrunch that the company will use the proceeds to focus on hiring more talent, as well as expanding domestic business and overseas markets in the U.S. and Japan.
Ko and four other co-founders established CLASS101 in 2018, which was pivoted from a tutoring service platform that was founded in 2015, Ko said. It has 350 employees now.
“We will keep supporting creators to monetize their talents and we will also allow creators to expand their revenue streams by selling their goods, digital files and more products via our platform,” Ko said.
When asked about what differentiated it from other peers, CLASS101 provides and ships all the necessary tools and material “Class Kit”, Ko said.
The company offers more than 2,000 classes within a raft of categories, with drawing, crafts, photography, cooking, music and more. It also provides about 230 classes in the U.S. and 220 classes in Japan. There are approximately 100,000 registered creators and 3 million registered users as of August 2021.
CLASS101 launched its platform in the U.S. in 2019 and entered Japan last year. The company opened online classes for kids aged under 14 in 2020.
“CLASS101 is a company that combines the advantages of Patreon and YouTube, offering tailored support for creators while fulfilling users’ learning needs,” co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital Eric Kim said, adding that it is the fastest growing company “in an economic phenomenon in which individuals follow their passions and do what they really enjoy while also making a living from it.”
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Workera.ai, a precision upskilling platform, taps $16M to close enterprise skills gap
Finding the right learning platform can be difficult, especially as companies look to upskill and reskill their talent to meet demand for certain technological capabilities, like data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence roles.
Workera.ai’s approach is to personalize learning plans with targeted resources — both technical and nontechnical roles — based on the current level of a person’s proficiency, thereby closing the skills gap.
The Palo Alto-based company secured $16 million in Series A funding, led by New Enterprise Associates, and including existing investors Owl Ventures and AI Fund, as well as individual investors in the AI field like Richard Socher, Pieter Abbeel, Lake Dai and Mehran Sahami.
Kian Katanforoosh, Workera’s co-founder and CEO, says not every team is structured or feels supported in their learning journey, so the company comes at the solution from several angles with an assessment on technical skills, where the employee wants to go in their career and what skills they need for that, and then Workera will connect those dots from where the employee is in their skillset to where they want to go. Its library has more than 3,000 micro-skills and personalized learning plans.
“It is what we call precision upskilling,” he told TechCrunch. “The skills data then can go to the organization to determine who are the people that can work together best and have a complementary skill set.”
Workera was founded in 2020 by Katanforoosh and James Lee, COO, after working with Andrew Ng, Coursera co-founder and Workera’s chairman. When Lee first connected with Katanforoosh, he knew the company would be able to solve the problem around content and basic fundamentals of upskilling.
It raised a $5 million seed round last October to give the company a total of $21 million raised to date. This latest round was driven by the company’s go-to-market strategy and customer traction after having acquired over 30 customers in 12 countries.
Over the past few quarters, the company began working with Fortune 500 companies, including Siemens Energy, across industries like professional services, medical devices and energy, Lee said. As spending on AI skills is expected to exceed $79 billion by 2022, he says Workera will assist in closing the gap.
“We are seeing a need to measure skills,” he added. “The size of the engagements are a sign as is the interest for tech and non-tech teams to develop AI literacy, which is a more pressing need.”
As a result, it was time to increase the engineering and science teams, Katanforoosh said. He plans to use the new funding to invest in more talent in those areas and to build out new products. In addition, there are a lot of natural language processes going on behind the scenes, and he wants the company to better understand it at a granular level so that the company can assess people more precisely.
Carmen Chang, general partner and head of Asia at NEA, said she is a limited partner in Ng’s AI fund and in Coursera, and has looked at a lot of his companies.
She said she is “very excited” to lead the round and about Workera’s concept. The company has a good understanding of the employee skill set, and with the tailored learning program, will be able to grow with company needs, Chang added.
“You can go out and hire anyone, but investing in the people that you have, educating and training them, will give you a look at the totality of your employees,” Chang said. “Workera is able to go in and test with AI and machine learning and map out the skill sets within a company so they will be able to know what they have, and that is valuable, especially in this environment.”
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Kiddom grabs early revenue amid $35M Series C funding
Kiddom, a platform that offers a digital curriculum that fits the core standards required by states, announced today that it has raised a $35 million Series C round led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Owl Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Outcomes Collective. The financing came nearly three years after Kiddom’s Series B, a $15 million round led by Owl.
The startup didn’t just raise money, it finally learned how to make some. Founded in 2012, Kiddom was able to raise millions without revenue or a clear business model. But Ahsan Rizvi, CEO and co-founder of Kiddom, and Abbas Manjee, chief academic officer and co-founder of Kiddom, think an early focus on adoption instead of monetization was necessary.
“At our Series B, we were definitely not making money,” Manjee said. “But we have a free product that teachers and students use, and the idea was to build an enterprise product on top of it.” It’s a common strategy with bottom up sales. For example, ClassDojo prioritized adoption for years before it finally introduced a paying version of its classroom socialization product.
Kiddom poured most of its capital into research and development into its enterprise product. It has two parts. First, it offers a platform that helps schools integrate all of their different platforms into an interface that tracks student utilization and achievement. Second, it offers that platform alongside the product it’s built up for years, a digital curriculum that fits in with Common Core, a set of math and English academic standards that students are required to learn on a grade by grade level. The latter is perhaps the hardest sell for Kiddom, but also the most lucrative.
Manjee explained vendor approval processes across the States can take a long time, and the stakes are high since decision-makers will only turn to a handful of vendors when it comes to meeting core standards.
A lot of Kiddom’s success depends on if traditional curriculum providers, like the Pearsons and McGraw-Hills of the world, don’t catch up to the digitization of education. Rizvi explained that older companies are “losing market share rapidly” right now. Last year, McGraw-Hill and Cengage terminated a proposed merger that would’ve added some fresh competition to the curriculum world.
The product has resonated with some users. While Kiddom declined to give specifics, it said that new ARR growth grew 2,525% its first year. In 2020 to 2021, ARR growth is on track to be 300%. It said that at least one teacher uses its product in 70% of schools in the United States, a metric that has remained consistent since 2018.
Kiddom’s fresh funding and revenue shows that its years of product development have kept it competitive in the eyes of investors, synergistic unicorns and the stingiest enterprise customer of them all, school districts.
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Don’t give your weed dealer all your data
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Our beloved Danny was back, joining Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris to chat through yet another incredibly busy week. As a window into our process, every week we tell one another that the next week we’ll cut the show down to size. Then the week is so interesting that we end up cutting a lot of news, but also keeping a lot of news. The chaotic process is a work in progress, but it means that the end result is always what we decided we can’t not talk about.
Here’s what we got into:
- A little URL to IRL update from Natasha, who just got back from an edtech conference.
- How one VC got hit by ransomware, and why stolen LP data could be a wake-up call for investors.
- The crew chatted through some Cloud 100 numbers, and riffed for a minute on Figma, Gusto and Mailchimp, companies all reportedly worth around the $10 billion mark.
- From the early-stage funding round side of things, we noodled on Surfside’s $4 million raise, and the capital that Pave recently attracted. Felt also raised money to make maps more mainstream, which had us thinking about use cases galore.
- In unicorn-land, Trendyol raised a mountain of cash, while UpGrad became India’s newest unicorn.
- Climate change is going to mean lots more companies need to handle disaster prep, Danny argues. His recent EC-1 here about RapidSOS got into the deep and complex world of three simple numbers: 911.
- And we ended the show with a riff on Salesforce+, which we had fun with but also tried to take seriously because we are journalists after all.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Product School raises $25M in growth equity to scale its product training platform
Traditional MBA programs can be costly, lengthy and often lack the application of real-world skills. Meanwhile, big global brands and companies who need product managers to grow their businesses can’t sit around waiting for people to graduate. And the edtech space hasn’t traditionally catered to this sector.
This is perhaps why Product School says it has secured $25 million in growth equity investment from growth fund Leeds Illuminate (subject to regulatory approval) to accelerate its product and partnerships with client companies.
The growth funding for the company comes after bootstrapping since 2014, in large part because product managers (PMs) are no longer needed just inside tech companies but have become sought after across almost virtually all industries.
Product School provides certificates for individuals as well as team training, and says it has experienced an upwelling of business since COVID switched so many companies into digital ones. It also now counts Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber and Amazon amongst its customers.
“Product managers have an outsized role in driving digital transformation and innovation across all sectors,” said Susan Cates, managing partner of Leeds Illuminate. “Having built the largest community of PMs in the world validates Product School’s certification as the industry standard for the market and positions the company at the forefront of upskilling top-notch talent for global organizations.”
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO and founder of Product School, who started the company after moving from Spain, said: “There has never been a better time in history to build digital products and Product School is excited to unlock value for product teams across the globe to help define the future. Our company was founded on the basis that traditional degrees and MBA programs simply don’t equip PMs with the real-world skills they require on the job.”
Product School has also produced the The Product Book, The Proddy Awards and ProductCon.
Its main competitor is MindTheProduct, a community and training platform, which has also boostrapped.
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The China tech crackdown continues
The Chinese government’s crackdown on its domestic technology industry continues, with Tencent under fresh pressure despite the company’s efforts to follow changing regulatory expectations.
News broke over the weekend that Beijing filed a civil suit against Tencent “over claims its messaging-app WeChat’s Youth Mode does not comply with laws protecting minors,” per the BBC. And NetEase, a major Chinese technology company, will delay the IPO of its music arm in Hong Kong. Why? Uncertain regulations, per Reuters.
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The latest spate of bad news for China’s technology industry follows a raft of regulatory changes and actions by the nation’s government that have deleted an enormous quantity of equity value. After a period of relatively light-touch regulatory oversight, domestic Chinese technology companies have found themselves on defense after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came after their market power in antitrust terms — and some of their business operations from other perspectives. Sectors hit the hardest include fintech and edtech.
Gaming is also in the CCP crosshairs.
After state media criticized the gaming industry as providing the digital equivalent of drugs to the nation’s youth last week, shares of companies like Tencent and NetEase fell. Tencent owns Riot Games, makers of the popular League of Legends title. NetEase generated $2.3 billion in gaming revenue out of total revenues of $3.1 billion in its most recent quarter.
NetEase stock traded around $110 per share in late July. It’s now worth around $90 per share after expectations shifted in light of the gaming news, indicating that investors are concerned about its future performance. Tencent’s Hong Kong-listed stock has also fallen, from HK$775.50 to HK$461.60 this morning.
Tencent tried to head off regulatory pressure, announcing changes to how it controls access to its games after the government’s shot across the bow. The effort doesn’t appear to have worked. That Tencent is being sued by the government despite its publicly announced changes implies that its proposed curbs to youth gaming were either insufficient or perhaps moot from the beginning.
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Edtech startup bina raises $1.4M to teach 4- to 12-year-olds, launch School-as-a-Service
With the pandemic wreaking havoc amongst early years education amid school lockdowns, it’s no wonder edtech startups have piled into the space. But it has also served to highlight the abysmal nature of early years teaching: Some 40 million teachers across the globe are leaving the sector, according to the World Bank. Of the 1.5 billion primary-age children, only a few can access high-quality education, and approximately 58 million primary-age children are out of education, most of whom are girls.
So the opportunity to make a difference, using online teaching, in these very young years, is great, because classes sizes can be reduced online, and the quality of teaching improved.
This is the idea behind bina, which bills itself as a “digital primary education ecosystem”. It has now raised $1.4 million to aim at the education of 4- to 12-year-olds.
The funding round was led by Taizo Son, one of Japan’s billionaires. Other investors and advisors include Jutta Steiner, founder at Parity Technologies, the company behind Polkadot decentralized protocol, and Lord Jim Knight, ex-Minister of Education (U.K.).
Bina’s “schtick” is that it has very small online class sizes of six students (3x smaller than the OECD average).
It also boasts of “adaptive learning paths” that cover international standards; teachers with a minimum of eight years of digital teaching experience; and data-driven decision making for its pedagogical approach.
Noam Gerstein, bina’s CEO and founder said: “I’ve interviewed students, teachers and parents globally for years, and it is clear a new systemic design is needed. With our founding families, we are building a world in which every child has access to quality education, educators’ skills are valued and continuously developed, and parents don’t need to choose between their work and family life.”
He says it also grants pupils company shares (RSUs) as they grow with the school. Currently available to English-speaking students in the CET time zone, the bina School is planning a SaaS product for governments, NGOs and school systems.
“We right now compete against companies like Outschool, Pearson’s online Academy, Primer and Prisma,” he told me over a call. “So these are the big names of the last year for the first phase. But the strategy is that we’re building it in two phases. The first phase is actually building a school that we operate as a ‘lab’ school. And the second phase is what we call ‘bina as a service’. So it’s a SaaS ‘school as a service’. The idea is that we offer collaboration with NGOs and governments, doing accreditation and training and licencing of the product. So for that second part we’re actually competing against the big accreditation system.”
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