GOMYCODE, Tunisia’s Edtech Startup Raises $8m Series A to Promote Global Expansion

GOMYCODE, a Tunisian edtech business, has raised $8 million in a series A round of funding.

AfricInvest, through its Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund (CAIF), and Proparco, a French-based development financing institution, co-led the deal, with existing investor Wamda Capital joining as a follow-on.

After raising a seed of $850,000 in October 2020, this new round of funding takes the startup’s total investment to $8.85 million.

Yahya Bouhlel (CEO) founded the edtech startup in 2017 to address a shortage of skilled engineers in Tunisia, a problem his older brother Amine Bouhlel was facing at the time, having recently returned to Tunisia from France to open a subsidiary for a French tech startup and needing to hire local developers.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Yahya, who had been coding since his early teens and had interned at many American companies producing mobile apps and iPhone games, said the idea to solve Amine’s developer shortage came to him when he had just graduated from high school.

“So the concept of developing a school or a learning experience with the spirit of Silicon Valley occurred,” Yahya said in the interview. “So we established GOMYCODE as a summer project and camp and grew that year.”

GOMYCODE uses a hybrid approach to teaching coding, with students spending half of their time learning online and the other half at one of the company’s 20 physical locations.

The organization, according to the CEO, is varied and adapts to local contexts; it employs over 500 local teachers in each location who teach in over 12 languages.

On the platform, students participate in two sorts of programs. One area has skills-based introductory courses that last up to three months and cost on average $250. The other segment consists of 5-month career-driven programs that cost an average of $750.

GOMYCODE also claims to make money by partnering with companies that provide their employees the option to study now and pay later. According to TechCrunch, this strategy accounts for only 10% of GOMYCODE’s revenue. Since its inception, the company’s entire revenue has increased three times per year.

According to the organization, it has partnered with a few schools to provide job placement for its students and has placed 80 percent of them through a job-placement program.

Because the problem of untrained and underskilled labor is a worldwide one, the 5-year-old firm was able to quickly expand into new markets. Tunisia, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Nigeria are the company’s current locations. The company expects that the new funding would enable them to expand into four more countries—South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Saudi Arabia—while also deepening its footprints in their current markets.

In the next two years, the edtech platform aims to reach 100,000 students and open 50 centers across Africa and the Middle East, having expanded from 100 students in its first year to roughly 4,000 active students today.