Nigerian Edtech Startup, uLesson, Raises $7.5m Series A led by Owl Ventures
uLesson, an edtech startup based in Nigeria that sells digital curriculum to students through SD cards, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Owl Ventures, which closed over half a billion in new fund money just months ago. Other participants include LocalGlobe and existing investors, including TLcom Capital and Founder Collective.
uLesson collates different curriculums and a network of tutors for thousands of students. It does this by leveraging mobile phones and providing a product pack of SD cards, dongle, and a set of headphones to students.
They can access lessons via streaming or use the SD cards to download and store the content. This allows the students to study remotely, removing challenges around internet access limitations and costs.
The financing comes a little over a year since uLesson closed its $3.1 million seed round in November 2019. The startup’s biggest difference between now and then isn’t simply the millions it has in the bank, it’s the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on its entire value proposition.
ULesson launched into the market just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic. The startup, which uses SD cards as a low-bandwidth way to deliver content, saw a wave of smart devices enter homes across Africa as students adapted to remote education.
“The ground became wet in a way we didn’t see before,” founder and CEO Sim Shagaya said. “It opens up the world for us to do all kinds of really amazing things we’ve wanted to do in the world of edtech that you can’t do in a strictly offline sense,” the founder added.
Similar to many edtech startups, uLesson has benefited from the overnight adoption of remote education. Its positioning as a supplementary education tool helped it surface 70% month over month growth, said Shagaya. The founder says that the digital infrastructure gains will allow them to “go online entirely by Q2 this year.”
As the largest fund focused on the edtech market, Owl Ventures fingers are in the pie of any high-flying edtech startup you can think of right now from India’s Byju and Whitehat Jr to US’ Quizlet and MasterClass.
With no investment play in Africa, uLesson’s addition to an already impressive portfolio was an opportunity for Owl Ventures to partake in the continent’s burgeoning edtech scene.
Owl Ventures is honoured to be partnering with uLesson for their Series A. The company has quickly grown into the premier platform, supporting students in Africa. And we are excited to support their global expansion, as they seek to empower students around the world,” managing director of Owl Ventures Tory Patterson said of the Series A round.
Source:
https://techpoint.africa/2021/01/19/ulesson-raises-7-5m-series-a/
