Many EdTech firms benefited from the pandemic’s disruption, earning large sums of money from investors all across the world, yet it seemed like African startups were left out. That is no longer the case: uLesson, a two-year-old business, announced today that it has raised $15 million in a Series B financing.
Tencent, Nielsen Ventures, and current investors Owl Ventures, TLcom Capital, and Founder Collective closed the transaction, which comes 11 months after uLesson received a $7.5 million Series A. It is the largest investment in an African EdTech business that has been made public.
Founded in 2019 by Nigerian serial entrepreneur Sim Shagaya, uLesson entered the market just as the epidemic hit last year. As a fledgling company, it has had to swap business concepts a few times to determine what works in an extremely competitive African industry.
The company began by offering K-12 pupils a product pack of SD cards and dongles with pre-recorded videos. They have the option of streaming classes or downloading and storing content on SD cards.
uLesson, on the other hand, has added additional features to make an all-encompassing edtech play for this audience. Quizzes and a homework help function were added to connect students with university instructors.
DevKids, a coding class outside of the core uLesson platform, now has a one-to-many live class feature with polls and leaderboards, as well as a one-to-one live experience.
However, DevKids has subsequently been rolled back. According to Shagaya, uLesson is working to integrate the functionality, which began as an experiment in teaching youngsters how to code and eventually accounted for 30% of the company’s revenue, into the uLesson platform by January of next year.
“What we want ultimately is different strata of free users that can use the app and can pay for a premium experience to attend live classes or get the homework helper,” said the CEO, who also founded e-commerce platforms DealDey and Konga.
“And because parents do want to invest in the best for their kids, one of the ways you can do that is personalized one-to-one instruction for their children, whether in coding through DevKids or math or science or English.”
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