uLesson, a two-year-old Nigerian edtech startup, has raised $15 million in a Series B financing. Tencent, Nielsen Ventures, and current investors Owl Ventures, TLcom Capital, and Founder Collective closed the transaction, which comes 11 months after uLesson received a $7.5 million Series A. It is the largest publicly announced investment in an African educational technology company.
“Tencent historically has been a prolific investor in edtech. They have a lot of learnings and that’s evident when you talk to them and the investments they’ve made not only in China but in India and across the world,” said founder and CEO, Sim Shagaya. “In them, we saw the partner that was willing to kind of get in here, work with us, and then give us the fuel to double down on what works.”
According to the company, the fresh funding would allow uLesson to continue investing in product development, expand its core technology, and introduce cohort-based learning features.
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It also intends to add “social sciences and financial accounting to the secondary level content library, as well as qualitative and quantitative reasoning to the elementary level” to its science and mathematics material.
Why The Investors Invested
uLesson has acquired considerable traction since it was founded in 2019. The number of paying users on uLesson increased by 600% in the last year, according to the company. Its monthly average users climbed by 700 percent, while daily average users increased by 430 percent in the same time period.
Since its launch in September, the company claims that demand for live lessons has increased by 222 percent. In terms of student achievement, the Abuja-based business says that some students have advanced from the 50th to the 90th percentile in their classes. It also said the uLesson app has received 2 million downloads so far. Over 12.3 million films have been viewed on the platform, and 25.6 million questions have been answered.
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David Frankel, managing partner at Founder Collective, compared what uLesson is doing with education in Africa to how Uber transformed transportation and Coupang changed e-commerce in the United States and South Korea, respectively, in a statement.
“I am an enthusiastic supporter of Shagaya and his vision for more accessible and cheap educational options for millions of people,” he said.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Founded in 2019 by Nigerian serial entrepreneur Sim Shagaya, uLesson entered the market just as the epidemic hit last year. As a newly formed company, it has had to swap business concepts a few times to determine what works in an extremely competitive African industry.
The company began by offering K-12 pupils a product pack of SD cards and dongles with pre-recorded videos. They have the option of streaming classes or downloading and storing content on SD cards.
uLesson, on the other hand, has added additional features to make an all-encompassing edtech play for this audience. Quizzes and a homework help function were added to connect students with university instructors. DevKids, a coding class outside of the core uLesson platform, now has a one-to-many live class feature with polls and leaderboards, as well as a one-to-one live experience.
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However, DevKids has subsequently been rolled back. According to Shagaya, uLesson is working to integrate the functionality, which began as an experiment in teaching youngsters how to code and eventually accounted for 30% of the company’s revenue, into the uLesson platform by January of next year.
“What we want ultimately is different strata of free users that can use the app and can pay for a premium experience to attend live classes or get the homework helper,” said the CEO, who also founded e-commerce platforms DealDey and Konga.
“And because parents do want to invest in the best for their kids, one of the ways you can do that is personalized one-to-one instruction for their children, whether in coding through DevKids or math or science or English.”
uLesson employs 180 field sales representatives to onboard schools and individual users in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana, the countries where the company focuses its marketing efforts.
The platform is also available in other markets, including South Africa, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, Liberia, Gambia, and the United States, according to Shagaya. According to Shagaya, Nigeria is uLesson’s largest market by far. 85 percent of uLesson’s paying users are from this country.
“We’re going to be rolling out a lot of these things next year because we’ve seen that this is [how] people use them,” Shagaya remarked, adding that “2021 for us was a year of testing what works and we know what works now. So there’s a lot of experimentation in 2021. And 2022, it will be executing on what works.”
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