FoondaMate, a South African Edtech business, has received $2 million in seed funding from LocalGlobe, a London-based venture capital firm, to expand its WhatsApp and Facebook-based learning chatbot globally.
FoondaMate assists students with their revision by providing instant answers to questions and access to revision papers, as well as providing guidance on how to respond to questions.
According to Co-founder Dacod Magagula, the startup is aimed at high-school students in emerging regions where WhatsApp is extensively used and access is much cheaper or free.
He claims that the company’s learning chatbot is simple to use, inexpensive, and provides an organized alternative to using search engines for studying.
Educators can also use FoondaMate’s integrated tools to assign and post homework as well as share other educational materials with students.
“It (WhatsApp) was in beta at the time, and I started playing around with it … I thought it’d be a really good way to enable access to study materials to students in the same position as myself…because a majority of students do not have access to the wider internet but have access to WhatsApp.
Also, a lot of network providers offer WhatsApp for free to attract users to their network,” Magagula said he began working on FoondaMate in August 2020, when WhatsApp released a test version of its API to allow businesses to communicate with customers.
Magagula co-founded FoondaMate with Tao Boyle, who was seeking to solve the supply chain to distribute textbooks to impoverished schools before they partnered up.
Furthermore, Magagula had extra experience from his high school days that convinced him of the idea’s viability.
To read our blog on “uLesson an African EdTech firm backed by Nielsen Ventures and Tencent has raised $15 million in funding,” click here.
