Leading 5 edtech companies in Nigeria 2021

The year 2021 was a fantastic year for the technology industry as a whole. As much as this was true across the board, certain industries stood out. Of course, there was fintech, which raised mega-rounds of funding.

Then there’s health technology, with Helium Health completing a major acquisition in far-flung Asia and 54Gene securing major investments while expanding its offerings and improving its facilities.

However, the educational technology sector was not overlooked. uLesson is proving to be the clear leader in that space, racking up massive traction while also securing a significant investment. There was also Edukoya, a startup that received significant funding while still in beta mode.

So, without further ado, here are the top five edtech platforms in Nigeria for 2021.

uLessons

We could discuss educational technology startups that achieved success in 2021, but uLessons took the year and ran with it from the start. The leading edtech company in Nigeria began the year with a bang, completing a $7.5 million Series A round in January.

But, if you thought that was impressive, the Sim Shagaya-led company improved on it by announcing a $15 million Series B round in December. This was the largest publicly disclosed investment in an African edtech startup.

Tencent, Nielsen Ventures, and existing investors Owl Ventures, TLcom Capital, and Founder Collective all contributed to the funding, which allowed the startup to raise $22.5 million by 2021. What is more impressive than that?

Sim Shagaya founded the company in 2019 and claims that its app has received over 2 million downloads so far. It also claims that over 12.3 million videos have been watched and 25.6 million questions have been answered on its platform.

uLesson also reported a 600% increase in paying users over the previous year. According to Techcrunch, its monthly average users increased by 700%, while average daily users increased by 430% during the same time period.

According to the company, demand for live lessons has increased by 222 percent since its launch in September 2021. It has raised a total of $25.6 million in disclosed funding to date.

AltSchool Africa

AltSchool Africa is one of my favorite success stories in the Nigerian edtech space for 2021. This is due to the fact that its goal is to do something no one else has done before: train tech talent for free and then certify them with a globally recognized certification. This would effectively make it Africa’s first developer certificate awarding institution.

The digital institution hopes to accomplish this through a partnership with Michael and Cecilia Ibru University (MCIU), Ughelli Delta State, which will be the certificate awarding institution.

AltSchool, a sub-institution of TalentQL, a tech talent outsourcing company, was founded in October 2021 with the goal of eradicating poverty by democratizing access to tech training for anyone in Africa. The institution does not charge tuition and assists students in finding job placements after they complete their training.

“We expect them to succeed, which is why we are willing to invest in their education.” The tuition is free of charge. The students are not required to pay a kobo. “We’ll take care of it,” said TalentQL’s Co-Founder and CEO.

Early applicants to AltSchool’s ‘early bird’ phase will begin their first assessment in early January. Mentored learning would concentrate on three key areas: front end, back end, and cloud engineering. The program would last 9 months, after which students would be placed in 3-month internship programs.

Edukoya

Edukoya arrived on the scene in December and made an immediate impact with its fundraising. It was really impressive for an education technology startup still in Beta to raise an outstanding $3.5 million seemingly out of nowhere.

The funding was the largest pre-seed round ever raised for an African edtech platform.

Honey Ogundeyi founded Edukoya in 2021 with the goal of creating the world’s largest online learning platform for Africans by making high-quality learning materials and support more accessible and affordable. Essentially, it wishes to reinvent how African students learn in the age of mobile devices.

It hopes to accomplish this by linking African students to digital curriculum content and on-demand teachers for real-time online learning. The company has offices in both the United Kingdom and Nigeria.

According to the startup, its app was the second most downloaded education app in Nigeria during its first week of release.

Africa has the fastest-growing school-age population globally, with over 260M students and counting. Our goal is to democratize access and make high quality instruction and content accessible and affordable to every student, regardless of where he or she lives on the continent

Honey Ogundeyi, Founder and CEO of Edukoya

Edves

While other edtech startups may be attempting to bring students online, Edves is taking a different approach. This strategy entails simply bringing schools online via its cloud-based platform.

Edves is a cloud-based school management software platform founded in September 2016 by Dimeji Falana and Dare Adebayo. It offers a comprehensive set of services that enables schools to manage report cards, fees, digital learning, student enrollment, and much more.

As part of its digital infrastructure efforts, the company also facilitates interaction between teachers, parents, and administrators in order to deliver education and collaborate on learners’ progress toward learning goals, as well as track and analyze learning outcomes.

The platform also allows parents to view information about their children/wards as well as pay fees. Because not all parents are technologically savvy, these details can be accessed via text, email, an app, or the web platform itself.

The edtech platform received a $575,000 seed funding extension in October as part of its plans to improve its products and bring more schools online. This was more than three years after it received $120,000 in seed funding from CCHub and Chinook Capital.

“Schools across the continent require simple, secure learner management software that addresses specific challenges with data capture, paperwork, and improving every aspect of school operations.”

Stranerd

While learning and studying are incentives in and of themselves, how about an edtech startup that allows students to learn and earn at the same time? This is exactly what Stranerd, a recently launched Nigerian edtech platform, is offering its users.

The edtech startup, founded by Jeremiah Godwin (CEO) and Timmy Salami (COO/CFO) and launched in August 2021 (Beta), began as an Instagram page that assisted primarily foreign students with their studies.

However, during the 2020 pandemic, there was an increase in the number of Nigerian students in need of education technology services. They also discovered that, aside from Ulesson, which caters primarily to K-2 students, A-Level and university students lacked access to a single platform that could solve their educational problems.

Stranerd also runs a Coin System, which functions as an on-site currency and reward system. The coin system, like real money, facilitates every action on the platform. The system allows users to earn and spend these coins on the platform’s offerings.

Overall, Stranerd provides students with a fun and enjoyable way to learn by allowing them to interact with their peers. It also allows them to earn money and, in some ways, teaches them how to be financially responsible by spending their coins on necessities. This is why we believe this startup is unique.