Author: azeeadmin

Mighty Networks, a platform designed to give creators and brands a dedicated place to start and grow communities, has closed on $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Owl Ventures.

Ziff Capital Partners and LionTree Partners also participated in the financing, along with existing backers Intel Capital, Marie Forleo, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Rosensweig, Reid Hoffman, BBG Ventures and Lucas Venture Group. The investment brings Palo Alto-based Mighty Networks’ total raised since its 2017 inception to $67 million. 

Mighty Networks founder and CEO Gina Bianchini — who started the company with Tim Herby and Thomas Aaron — is no stranger to building nurturing environments for community building. Previously, she was the CEO and co-founder of Ning, where she led the company’s rapid growth to three million Ning Networks created and about 100 million users around the world in three years. 

With Mighty Networks, Bianchini’s goal is to build “a creator middle class” founded on community memberships, events and live online courses.  

“Basically we have a platform for people to create communities the way that they would create e-commerce stores,” she told TechCrunch. “So what Shopify has done for e-commerce, we’re doing for digital subscriptions and digital payments where the value is around a community that is mastering something interesting or important together, and not just content alone.”

The company’s flagship Business Plan product is aimed at new creators with the goal of giving them an easy way to get started with digital subscriptions, Bianchini said. Established brands, organizations and successful creators use the company’s Mighty Pro plan to get everything Mighty Networks offers on their own branded iOS, iPad and Android apps. 

Mighty Networks — which operates as a SaaS business — has seen impressive growth. In 2020, ARR climbed by “2.5x” while annual customer growth climbed by 200%. Customers are defined as paying creators who host their community, courses and events on their own Mighty Network. The company also saw a 400% annual growth in payments, or rather in subscriptions and payments where a creator or brand will sell a membership or an online course.

The pandemic was actually a boon to the business, as well as the fact that it launched live events last year.

“We were able to help many businesses quickly move online — from yoga studios to leadership speakers and consultants — and now that the world is coming back, they’ll be able to use the features that we’ve built into the platform from day one around finding members, events and groups near them, as well as making everything via not just the web but mobile apps,” Bianchini said.

One of the startup’s goals is to help people understand that they don’t need massive amounts of followers (such as 1 million followers on TikTok) to be successful creators. For example, a creator charging 30 people for a subscription that amounts to around $1,000 a year can still pull in $30,000 a year. So while it’s not huge, it’s certainly still substantial — hence the company’s intent to build a “creator middle class.”

Mighty Networks has more than 10,000 paying creators, brands and coaches today. Users include established creators and brands such as YouTube star Adriene Mishler, Xprize and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis, author Luvvie Ajayi Jones, comedian Amanda Seales, Girlboss founder Sophia Amoruso and brands such as the TED conference and wellness scheduling platform MINDBODY.

“Content alone will kill the creator economy,” Bianchini said. “We can’t build a thriving creator movement on an exhausting, unfair dynamic where content creators rent audiences from big tech platforms, are required to produce a never-ending stream of content and get paid pennies for it, if they get paid at all. Creators need to own their own community on the internet, where members meet each other and get results and transformation.” 

Owl Ventures Managing Director Amit Patel said his firm was impressed by Mighty Networks before it even met the company.

“No company in this space has more loyal, passionate believers, and when we saw firsthand that creators could successfully build paid communities and online courses on a Mighty Network with as few as 30 members, we wanted to be a part of unlocking this creator middle class for a million more creators,” Patel said in a written statement.

The company plans to use its new capital on product development across media types, payment options and expansion into new markets. 

Earlier this month, Pico, a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data, announced that it had launched an upgraded platform and raised $6.5 million in new funding. Essentially, the company is building what it considers to be an operating system for the creator market.

Cuckoo Internet, which is aiming to be an insurgent startup in the broadband provider space in the UK, has closed a $6 million investment round led by RTP Global, along with participation from JamJar Investments. It will also launch on price-comparison site uSwitch.

RTP Global was an early backer of Yandex, Delivery Hero, and Datadog. JamJar has backed Bulb, Deliveroo, Tails and Oatly. Other individual investors in the round included former executives of Monzo and Stripe,

Cuckoo’s pitch is that it has a simple broadband offering, suppling a single 67 Mb/s fibre deal on a monthly rolling contract with “no hidden fees” it says.

In a statement Alexander Fitzgerald, Founder and CEO at Cuckoo, said: “The broadband market is broken and consumers are being ripped off every day. The importance of fast, reliable and affordable broadband has come into sharper focus with millions of people working from home over the past year. We’re excited that this funding will enable us to help tens of thousands of people across the country make their broadband simple, for good.”

Gareth Jefferies, Partner at RTP Global, said: “Consumer broadband is one of the largest markets yet one of the most poorly served. Consumers are fatiguing of customer-hostile pricing practices, inflexible contracts and deliberately awful customer service, and just as we have seen in insurance, energy and banking, we will see a number of challenger providers come in to eat incumbents’ lunch with differentiated product packagings and a fresh respect for their customers.”

Cuckoo Internet, which is aiming to be an insurgent startup in the broadband provider space in the UK, has closed a $6 million investment round led by RTP Global, along with participation from JamJar Investments. It will also launch on price-comparison site uSwitch.

RTP Global was an early backer of Yandex, Delivery Hero, and Datadog. JamJar has backed Bulb, Deliveroo, Tails and Oatly. Other individual investors in the round included former executives of Monzo and Stripe,

Cuckoo’s pitch is that it has a simple broadband offering, suppling a single 67 Mb/s fibre deal on a monthly rolling contract with “no hidden fees” it says.

In a statement Alexander Fitzgerald, Founder and CEO at Cuckoo, said: “The broadband market is broken and consumers are being ripped off every day. The importance of fast, reliable and affordable broadband has come into sharper focus with millions of people working from home over the past year. We’re excited that this funding will enable us to help tens of thousands of people across the country make their broadband simple, for good.”

Gareth Jefferies, Partner at RTP Global, said: “Consumer broadband is one of the largest markets yet one of the most poorly served. Consumers are fatiguing of customer-hostile pricing practices, inflexible contracts and deliberately awful customer service, and just as we have seen in insurance, energy and banking, we will see a number of challenger providers come in to eat incumbents’ lunch with differentiated product packagings and a fresh respect for their customers.”

Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence start-up, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5M Series A funding round from UK-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and, Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype’s founding engineers, giving it a valuation of around $100 million.

Faculty will work with NHS England and NHS Improvement to build upon the Early Warning System (EWS) it developed for the service, during the pandemic. Based on Bayesian hierarchical modeling, Faculty says the EWS uses aggregate data (for example, COVID-19 positive case numbers, 111 calls, and mobility data) to warn hospitals about potential spikes in cases so they can divert staff, beds, and equipment needed. This learning will now be applied across the whole of the service, for issues other than the pure pandemic response, such as improving service delivery and patient care and predicting A&E demand and winter pressures.

Faculty also worked with NHSX as a partner for the NHS AI Lab, which developed the National Covid-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID).

Faculty has also reportedly worked with the UK Home Office to apply AI to its database of terrorists, as well as the BBC and easyJet.

I asked Richard Sargeant, COO of Faculty, if he thought Faculty was the ‘Palantir for the UK’ (Palantir has also worked with the NHS during the pandemic: “We are, I believe, a really effective and scalable AI company, not just for the UK but we’re working in the US and in Europe, Asia. I think we will continue to scale. We’re growing, and we’re going to grow because I believe that AI can make things better for the citizens, for customers. Palantir doesn’t really do AI, they do data engineering in a big way. And we’ve seen them be effective in the NHS. I think Faculty kind of stands on its own.”

He said that Faculty has a different role to Palantir: “Palantir has helped with the data pipelines, and they’re using their software to pull a lot of data together, but really they’re not a machine learning organization, their specialism is in gathering data together. Data across the NHS is rather an archipelago. It’s in hundreds of different places, and being able to gather together makes it much easier to do machine learning, both centrally and at a local level. One of the things that sets the early warning system apart is not just the use of machine learning, but the use of explainability to give clinicians and managers, some understanding of why the models are forecasting the results that they are, which is relatively cutting edge stuff, and that’s the stuff that Faculty specializes in that Palantir doesn’t.”

I asked him why Faculty had attracted VC when, typically, VCs invest in startups that have scalable products: “It’s a good question and it’s something that we often get asked. I see Faculty as a little bit different from your classic software as a service business, and from a consultancy. AI isn’t a ‘once and done’ product, and neither is it something that people create from scratch every time. But there are core components of what we do, that we can use again and again, but also the models themselves are always bespoke… it’s a combination of the bespoke, and the common, or generic together, that makeup Faculty, and that’s a bit different.”

Faculty is not a stranger to controversy over its government contracts. Last year it was revealed that a a UK cabinet minister owned £90,000 of shares in Faculty, when it was awarded a £2.3m contract from NHSX to help run the NHS Covid-19 Data Store.

Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence start-up, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5M Series A funding round from UK-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and, Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype’s founding engineers, giving it a valuation of around $100 million.

Faculty will work with NHS England and NHS Improvement to build upon the Early Warning System (EWS) it developed for the service, during the pandemic. Based on Bayesian hierarchical modeling, Faculty says the EWS uses aggregate data (for example, COVID-19 positive case numbers, 111 calls, and mobility data) to warn hospitals about potential spikes in cases so they can divert staff, beds, and equipment needed. This learning will now be applied across the whole of the service, for issues other than the pure pandemic response, such as improving service delivery and patient care and predicting A&E demand and winter pressures.

Faculty also worked with NHSX as a partner for the NHS AI Lab, which developed the National Covid-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID).

Faculty has also reportedly worked with the UK Home Office to apply AI to its database of terrorists, as well as the BBC and easyJet.

I asked Richard Sargeant, COO of Faculty, if he thought Faculty was the ‘Palantir for the UK’ (Palantir has also worked with the NHS during the pandemic: “We are, I believe, a really effective and scalable AI company, not just for the UK but we’re working in the US and in Europe, Asia. I think we will continue to scale. We’re growing, and we’re going to grow because I believe that AI can make things better for the citizens, for customers. Palantir doesn’t really do AI, they do data engineering in a big way. And we’ve seen them be effective in the NHS. I think Faculty kind of stands on its own.”

He said that Faculty has a different role to Palantir: “Palantir has helped with the data pipelines, and they’re using their software to pull a lot of data together, but really they’re not a machine learning organization, their specialism is in gathering data together. Data across the NHS is rather an archipelago. It’s in hundreds of different places, and being able to gather together makes it much easier to do machine learning, both centrally and at a local level. One of the things that sets the early warning system apart is not just the use of machine learning, but the use of explainability to give clinicians and managers, some understanding of why the models are forecasting the results that they are, which is relatively cutting edge stuff, and that’s the stuff that Faculty specializes in that Palantir doesn’t.”

I asked him why Faculty had attracted VC when, typically, VCs invest in startups that have scalable products: “It’s a good question and it’s something that we often get asked. I see Faculty as a little bit different from your classic software as a service business, and from a consultancy. AI isn’t a ‘once and done’ product, and neither is it something that people create from scratch every time. But there are core components of what we do, that we can use again and again, but also the models themselves are always bespoke… it’s a combination of the bespoke, and the common, or generic together, that makeup Faculty, and that’s a bit different.”

Faculty is not a stranger to controversy over its government contracts. Last year it was revealed that a a UK cabinet minister owned £90,000 of shares in Faculty, when it was awarded a £2.3m contract from NHSX to help run the NHS Covid-19 Data Store.

China’s plan to introduce its digital currency is getting a lot of help from its tech conglomerates. JD.com, a major Chinese online retailer that competes with Alibaba, said Monday that it has started paying some staff in digital yuan, the virtual version of the country’s physical currency.

China has been busy experimenting with digital currency over the past few months. In October, Shenzhen, a southern city known for its progressive economic policies, doled out 10 million yuan worth of digital currency to 500,000 residents, who could then use the money to shop at certain online and offline retailers.

Several other large Chinese cities have followed Shenzhen’s suit. The residents in these regions has to apply through selected banks to start receiving and paying by digital yuan.

The electronic yuan initiative is a collective effort involving China’s regulators, commercial banks and technology solution providers. At first glance, the scheme still mimics how physical yuan is circulating at the moment; under the direction of the central bank, the six major commercial banks in China, including ICBC, distribute the digital yuan to smaller banks and a web of tech solution providers, who could help bring more use cases to the new electronic money.

For example, JD.com partnered up with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) to deposit the digital income. The online retailer has become one of the first organizations in China to pay wages in electronic yuan; in August, some government workers in the eastern city of Suzhou also began getting paid in the digital money.

Across the board, China’s major tech companies have actively participated in the buildout of the digital yuan ecosystem, which will help the central government better track money flows.

Aside from JD.com, video streaming platform Bilibili, on-demand services provider Meituan and ride-hailing app Didi have also begun accepting digital yuan for user purchases. Gaming and social networking giant Tencent became one of the “digital yuan operators” and will take part in the design, R&D and operational work of the electronic money. Jack Ma’s Ant Group, which is undergoing a major overhaul following a stalled IPO, has also joined hands with the central bank to work on building out the infrastructure to move money digitally. Huawei, the telecom equipment titan, debutted a wallet on one of its smartphone models that allows users to spend digital yuan instantaneously even if the device is offline.

An Indian startup that is helping digitize and transform affordable private schools to better serve students from middle and low-income groups of families said on Monday it has raised $30 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its efforts in the world’s second most populous nation.

GSV Ventures and WestBridge led the Series D financing round of the Indian startup, which has raised over $69 million to date.

LEAD School, founded by Sumeet Mehta and Smita Deorah in 2012, has developed an integrated system to help K-12 schools with the curriculum they teach, how they teach them, secure books and other resources, and better evaluate the learning outcome.

Tthe startup set up its own schools in rural areas in India in its early years to identify the challenges that students and teachers faced. A key insight they found was that students struggled with english and needed years-worth of learning to be able to just fully understand any other subject.

“We were always data centric. We measured our performance based on student data. How well our classes looked was not a criteria for success,” said Deorah in an interview with TechCrunch.

In the past few years, LEAD School has grown by working with affordable private schools. Deorah said this strategy has helped the startup scale its technology stack and reach more students.

Amid the global pandemic, which prompted New Delhi to shut schools last year, LEAD School’s offering has proven even more useful to schools. The startup, which today caters to over 2,000 schools and 800,000 students, grew by 3X last year, it said.

“LEAD School is rapidly emerging as a paradigm for transforming K-12 education. Based in India and partnered with affordable school owners (a segment that is larger than the entire US K-12 system), LEAD serves over 800,000 students today,” said Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures, in a statement.

“LEAD has experienced tremendous growth because of its consistent delivery of high academic outcomes to students and high ‘return on education’ to teachers, school owners and parents. GSV is honored to be investing in an organization that is changing the life trajectory of so many students.”

This is a developing story. More to follow…

An alleged database of about 20 million BigBasket users has leaked on a well-known cybercrime forum, months after the Indian grocery delivery startup confirmed it had faced a data breach.

The database includes users’ email address, phone number, address, scrambled password, date of birth, and scores of interactions they had with the service. TechCrunch confirmed details of some customers listed in the database — including those of the author.

BigBasket co-founders did not respond to texts requesting comment.

The startup confirmed in November last year that it had suffered a data breach after reports emerged that hackers had siphoned off information of 20 million customers from the platform.

TechCrunch has asked one BigBasket co-founder whether the startup ever disclosed the data breach to customers.

A hacker who goes by the name ShinyHunters published the alleged BigBasket database — and made it available for anyone to download — on a popular cybercrime forum over the weekend. In newer posts on the forum, several threat actors claimed that they had decoded the hashed passwords and were selling it. ShinyHunters didn’t immediately respond to a text requesting comment.

The incident comes weeks after Indian conglomerate Tata Group agreed to acquire BigBasket, valuing the Indian startup at over $1.8 billion. The acquisition proposal is currently awaiting approval by the Indian regulator.

In public schools across Africa, classrooms are often overcrowded and this affects how teachers and students interact. The large classroom creates too much work for teachers leaving students’ individual problems unattended.

Private schools are modeled to fix these issues, but they can be expensive for the average African middle-class professional with kids. Kidato, an online school for K-12 students in Africa, presents another alternative and is announcing today that it has closed its $1.4 million seed investment.

The investors who participated in the round are Learn Start Capital, Launch Africa Ventures Fund, Graph Ventures and Century Oak Capital, among other notable local and global angel investors.

Kidato was founded by Kenyan serial entrepreneur Sam Gichuru in 2020. As a father of three kids, he encountered similar problems facing the average Kenyan middle-class professional, one of which was struggling to keep up with private school exorbitant tuition fees as high as $8,000 yearly.

“I have three kids. I moved them from private schools to homeschooling because that was the next option to give them the same quality of education but at an affordable price,” Gichuru told TechCrunch. That was when I started noticing the other challenges private schools had.”

First is the overcrowded nature of these schools. Typically, public schools have a teacher-to-student ratio of 1:50 while private schools are at 1:20.  “Depending on how much you pay for school fees. The more prestigious the school, the smaller the teacher-to-student ratio. That for me was a big indicator that you want to have a small number of students per teacher,” added Gichuru.

Then there’s the issue of long and tiring commutes for students. Gichuru tells me that kids going to private schools in Nairobi would have to wake up by 5 a.m., prepare to get on the bus at 6 a.m. to get to school at 7 a.m.

Like any homeschooling model, Gichuru had teachers come to his house to teach his kids what they’d ordinarily learn in school. But when the pandemic hit, he had to find another alternative by building a platform around Zoom for these teachers to continue delivering lessons for his kids. By September, the platform had opened up to accommodate 10 more children outside his home. In January, the number of students in its learning-from-home program increased to 30 students.

It is easy to see why the product is catching on with parents. Due to the pandemic, video services like Zoom have become the norm for the middle class in Africa with high internet accessibility. Also, cutting commute time helps to spend more time with family while reducing costs.

Building an online school for kids while capitalizing on the advantages of parents’ new remote work culture also got the Kenyan startup accepted into Y Combinator in January. Since then, Kidato has onboarded more than 50 students and claims to be growing at a 100% quarter on quarter. 

Gichuru says Kidata wants to ensure better learning outcomes in smaller personalized class sizes. It is also offering the same international curriculum but with an average of 1:5 teacher-student ratio.

The company has also implemented after-school programs like robotics and chess, art, coding, and debate classes. Typically, they are usually found among students from affluent schools; however, they are being democratized by Kidato to the more than 700 registered students using its platform. The students mainly from Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Switzerland, Tanzania, UK, United States, and UAE pay $5 per lesson, the company revealed.

Kidato wants to make learning fun and gratifying. According to Gichuru, the business trains its 740 teachers on how to make classes interactive by using the context of arcade games like Minecraft and Roblox to tailor lessons taught to students in different subjects.

“Drawing from our understanding about how these platforms work and how kids learn from them, we have built-in behavior reward mechanisms such as lesson merits into our teaching methods resulting in interesting and enjoyable virtual classes,” an excerpt from the statement read.

But what happens when Kidato meets a demand and supply problem. While its product seems appealing for students, will Kidato find enough qualified teachers to meet the growing demand? The CEO holds that his company has it figured out.

Most private schools shut down during the lockdowns. Though some are beginning to re-open gradually, they are embarking on a recovery process with increased school fees and reduced teachers’ salaries. This has presented a big opportunity for Kidato as it currently has a waitlist of 3,000 teachers who are being swayed by Kidato’s promise of better pay. In the long run, this number creates a pipeline for 15,000 students.  

Besides, Kidato doesn’t incur infrastructural costs like real estate, a feature common with traditional schools. Therefore the revenue made from students doesn’t go into any extreme costs, which means more money for teachers.

“Our teachers are paid at least one and a half times more than the average teacher in a private school, and that has driven a great supply of teachers to us.”

Kidato’s revenue split with teachers is 70/30; teachers take the larger percentage. Gichuru adds that if teachers combine their efforts in both normal and afterschool classes, they can earn an average of $2,000 per month.

One would’ve thought that a challenge Kidato would be facing despite its progress would be internet and power but that’s not the case. It is the skepticism of whether Kidato can offer socialization for the students. To solve that, Kidato is adopting an offline approach by leveraging the connections of corporates and align its after-school classes to include monthly educational field trips.

“We’re trying to show them how well kids socialize on our platform. We are partnering with companies that can make it possible to take these kids to plantations, factories, planetariums,” the CEO added.

Kidato is Gichuru’s second stint at Y Combinator. The entrepreneur who founded one of Kenya’s well-known incubator Nailab, also co-founded recruitment platform, Kuhustle. The company which seems to be in pilot mode at the moment, took part in Y Combinator’s batch in 2015.

Kidato has some high expectations given the CEO’s experience and as the only edtech startup in this current batch. The company will use the seed financing for growth and product development as it hopes to replace brick-and-mortar schools. In Gichuru’s words regarding the company’s future, he said, “in the next couple of years, we want to have the biggest online school for K-12 students.” 

In public schools across Africa, classrooms are often overcrowded and this affects how teachers and students interact. The large classroom creates too much work for teachers leaving students’ individual problems unattended.

Private schools are modeled to fix these issues, but they can be expensive for the average African middle-class professional with kids. Kidato, an online school for K-12 students in Africa, presents another alternative and is announcing today that it has closed its $1.4 million seed investment.

The investors who participated in the round are Learn Start Capital, Launch Africa Ventures Fund, Graph Ventures and Century Oak Capital, among other notable local and global angel investors.

Kidato was founded by Kenyan serial entrepreneur Sam Gichuru in 2020. As a father of three kids, he encountered similar problems facing the average Kenyan middle-class professional, one of which was struggling to keep up with private school exorbitant tuition fees as high as $8,000 yearly.

“I have three kids. I moved them from private schools to homeschooling because that was the next option to give them the same quality of education but at an affordable price,” Gichuru told TechCrunch. That was when I started noticing the other challenges private schools had.”

First is the overcrowded nature of these schools. Typically, public schools have a teacher-to-student ratio of 1:50 while private schools are at 1:20.  “Depending on how much you pay for school fees. The more prestigious the school, the smaller the teacher-to-student ratio. That for me was a big indicator that you want to have a small number of students per teacher,” added Gichuru.

Then there’s the issue of long and tiring commutes for students. Gichuru tells me that kids going to private schools in Nairobi would have to wake up by 5 a.m., prepare to get on the bus at 6 a.m. to get to school at 7 a.m.

Like any homeschooling model, Gichuru had teachers come to his house to teach his kids what they’d ordinarily learn in school. But when the pandemic hit, he had to find another alternative by building a platform around Zoom for these teachers to continue delivering lessons for his kids. By September, the platform had opened up to accommodate 10 more children outside his home. In January, the number of students in its learning-from-home program increased to 30 students.

It is easy to see why the product is catching on with parents. Due to the pandemic, video services like Zoom have become the norm for the middle class in Africa with high internet accessibility. Also, cutting commute time helps to spend more time with family while reducing costs.

Building an online school for kids while capitalizing on the advantages of parents’ new remote work culture also got the Kenyan startup accepted into Y Combinator in January. Since then, Kidato has onboarded more than 50 students and claims to be growing at a 100% quarter on quarter. 

Gichuru says Kidata wants to ensure better learning outcomes in smaller personalized class sizes. It is also offering the same international curriculum but with an average of 1:5 teacher-student ratio.

The company has also implemented after-school programs like robotics and chess, art, coding, and debate classes. Typically, they are usually found among students from affluent schools; however, they are being democratized by Kidato to the more than 700 registered students using its platform. The students mainly from Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Switzerland, Tanzania, UK, United States, and UAE pay $5 per lesson, the company revealed.

Kidato wants to make learning fun and gratifying. According to Gichuru, the business trains its 740 teachers on how to make classes interactive by using the context of arcade games like Minecraft and Roblox to tailor lessons taught to students in different subjects.

“Drawing from our understanding about how these platforms work and how kids learn from them, we have built-in behavior reward mechanisms such as lesson merits into our teaching methods resulting in interesting and enjoyable virtual classes,” an excerpt from the statement read.

But what happens when Kidato meets a demand and supply problem. While its product seems appealing for students, will Kidato find enough qualified teachers to meet the growing demand? The CEO holds that his company has it figured out.

Most private schools shut down during the lockdowns. Though some are beginning to re-open gradually, they are embarking on a recovery process with increased school fees and reduced teachers’ salaries. This has presented a big opportunity for Kidato as it currently has a waitlist of 3,000 teachers who are being swayed by Kidato’s promise of better pay. In the long run, this number creates a pipeline for 15,000 students.  

Besides, Kidato doesn’t incur infrastructural costs like real estate, a feature common with traditional schools. Therefore the revenue made from students doesn’t go into any extreme costs, which means more money for teachers.

“Our teachers are paid at least one and a half times more than the average teacher in a private school, and that has driven a great supply of teachers to us.”

Kidato’s revenue split with teachers is 70/30; teachers take the larger percentage. Gichuru adds that if teachers combine their efforts in both normal and afterschool classes, they can earn an average of $2,000 per month.

One would’ve thought that a challenge Kidato would be facing despite its progress would be internet and power but that’s not the case. It is the skepticism of whether Kidato can offer socialization for the students. To solve that, Kidato is adopting an offline approach by leveraging the connections of corporates and align its after-school classes to include monthly educational field trips.

“We’re trying to show them how well kids socialize on our platform. We are partnering with companies that can make it possible to take these kids to plantations, factories, planetariums,” the CEO added.

Kidato is Gichuru’s second stint at Y Combinator. The entrepreneur who founded one of Kenya’s well-known incubator Nailab, also co-founded recruitment platform, Kuhustle. The company which seems to be in pilot mode at the moment, took part in Y Combinator’s batch in 2015.

Kidato has some high expectations given the CEO’s experience and as the only edtech startup in this current batch. The company will use the seed financing for growth and product development as it hopes to replace brick-and-mortar schools. In Gichuru’s words regarding the company’s future, he said, “in the next couple of years, we want to have the biggest online school for K-12 students.”