Kidato, an African online school for K-12 students, has announced the completion of its $1.4 million seed investment round. The seed funding will be used by the Kenyan startup, which was admitted into Y Combinator in January this year, for growth and product creation in order to replace brick-and-mortar schools.
“Drawing from our understanding about how…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,” said the startup in a statement.
Learn Start Capital, Launch Africa Ventures Fund, Graph Ventures, and Century Oak Capital, among other prominent local and global angel investors, participated in the round.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Founded in 2020 by Sam Gichuru, Kidato is an online K-12 school that offers a high-quality, affordable education to Africa’s rising middle class, where parents are often forced to choose between public schools with student-teacher ratios as high as 50:1 or private schools with high tuition fees.
“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 said. That was when I started noticing the other challenges private schools had.”
Kidata, according to Gichuru, wants to ensure improved learning outcomes in smaller, more customized classes. It also offers the same foreign program, but with a teacher-to-student ratio of 1:5.
After-school programs such as robotics and chess, as well as sculpture, coding, and debate classes, have been introduced by the organization. They are typically found among students from wealthier schools, but Kidato is democratizing them for the more than 700 registered students who use its platform. According to the business, students from Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Switzerland, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates pay $5 per lesson.
Kidato currently has a waiting list of 3,000 teachers who have been persuaded by the prospect of higher pay. This figure, in the long run, provides a pipeline for 15,000 students.
The revenue split between Kidato and teachers is 70/30, with teachers receiving the greater portion. Teachers will receive an average of $2,000 a month if they combine their efforts in both regular and afterschool classes, according to Gichuru.
Kidato is Gichuru’s second Y Combinator project. Kuhustle is a recruitment platform co-founded by the entrepreneur who founded one of Kenya’s most well-known incubators, Nailab. The venture, which appears to be in pilot mode at the moment, was a part of the 2016 Y Combinator batch.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer