Edves has raised $575,000 USD to improve product and bring more schools online.The funding round, which was oversubscribed, was led by Beta Ventures along with Launch Africa, Chinook Capital (follow on) and Future Africa.
Edves is an Education Technology company that serves African k-12 schools by digitizing learning and administration to ensure multi-curricular lesson delivery online and offline.
And as digital infrastructure, it enables collaboration between Teachers, Parents and Administrators to deliver education, and collaborate on learners’ progress on learning goals, tracking and analyzing learning outcomes. Since its inception, over 790 schools have used the software to automate operations in Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe.
The Lagos-based Edtech firm won the 2018 Best Edtech prize in the emerging markets at the Seedstars Global Summit in Switzerland, participated in the 2019 MindCET Go Edtech accelerator in Tel Aviv, New Delhi, New York, Boston and London as the first and the only African Edtech ever selected for the programme. According to Semrush, SimilarWeb and Google Analytics, Edves was the most used indigenous Edtech platform for K-12 schools learning continuity and end-of-term examination in Nigeria between March and September 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic and school lockdown.
The platform has been adopted by top, medium and small Schools in Nigeria, serving over 29,000 Teachers, 96,000 Parents and 232,000 Students in three African markets. Recently, the startup partnered with MTN Nigeria PLC to zero-rate data consumption for every student, parent and teacher on the platform. And this comes with Free 500MB daily data for every MTN subscriber across Nigeria.
The CEO/Co-founder, ‘Dimeji Falana and COO/Co-founder, Dare Adebayo, narrated the fund would fuel product improvement, the release of new offerings to address fresh consumer needs in the Nigerian market and major segments in other African markets. The team is on a milestone to hit 1,000 schools, which they are currently at 790 schools in three African markets.
Beta.Ventures (BV) General Partner, Ovo Emorhokpor commented on their decision to invest in Edves. “Beta.Ventures has a clear mandate to support exceptional African startups and entrepreneurs bringing actual value to Nigeria and other African communities. We have witnessed Edves firsthand and seen how they deliver on their promise to digitise the learning process in and out of the classroom in Africa. We are thrilled to be part of their journey as they scale their offerings and expand into new markets. Beta Ventures is an early-stage investor, focused on partnering with high-potential technology entrepreneurs that are building significant companies for the African market.”
Zachariah George, Managing Partner at Launch Africa Ventures commented on their investment rationale saying, “With nearly 60% of Africa’s population of 1.4 billion being under the age of 25, digital teaching and learning is a must-have and not a nice-to-have. Schools all over the continent need easy-to-use, secure learner management software that encompasses all school needs by addressing specific challenges with capturing data, paperwork, and improving every area of school operations. With its proprietary technology, presence in 3 countries and nearly 800 institutions already onboard in Nigeria alone, we feel very confident in the EdVes team’s ability to tackle this huge opportunity head-on.”
Suru Avoseh, General Partner Chinook Capital shared the rationale for the decision to back Edves for the second time. “Since making an initial investment into Edves in 2018, we have been impressed with the business performance. With over 35 million students and 75,000 schools in Nigeria still trapped in the manual school process, we maintain and still recognize the massively untapped opportunity in this sector and envisage Edtech to play a huge role in digitizing African Education at a big scale. At the height of the unexpected COVID-related lockdown, the demand for Edtech products scaled globally (further market validation), however many schools were caught unaware and paid an expensive price to work around the situation.
What Edves has done is to introduce innovative technology that makes this transition to digital education seamless at a cost-effective rate. That’s why we invested in Edves and the team. The adoption and demand for their products have been impressive with a reach of over 780 schools in Nigeria with 350,000+ connected players (educators, parents and students). To realize its ambitions to play at a bigger scale, a regional expansion is necessary and our aim is to continue to support Edves’ efforts to achieve the long-term goal: To become the operating system for k-12 schools in emerging markets”.
“Dimeji and Dare are tenacious technology entrepreneurs in the education space. We’re particularly excited about their execution and growth over the years, especially supporting parents and schools during COVID. A lot of opportunities exist with education in Africa. The particular problem that Edves solves is critical to education management. It frees up teachers’ time to focus on more important tasks and helps parents stay abreast of their child’s educational progress. We’re excited to partner with them to build the future of learning in Africa.” – Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Managing Partner, Future Africa.
With a vision to reimagine education and make learning simple, Edves was founded in 2016 by Dimeji Falana and Dare Adebayo and the Edtech startup is currently serving 357,000 students, parents and educators.