Zeraki, a Kenyan edtech company that has developed digital learning and school data analytics platforms, has received $1.8 million in early funding lead by Acumen Fund for product catalogue expansion and regional expansion.
The Nairobi Business Angels Network (NaiBAN) and Melvyn Lubega, co-founder of Go1, an Australia-based edtech unicorn, all invested in the round, as did Save the Children Impact Investment Fund, Verdant Frontiers Fintech, and Logos Ventures.
Zeraki intends to use the cash to introduce new administrative tools for schools, such as timetabling software, as well as to assist parents with fee loans.
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Since its inception, the firm has gained significant traction. So far, it has added over 5,000 schools with a total of 2 million kids. The business anticipates that demand will continue to grow as it expands into new markets and more schools adopt digital solutions to streamline administrative duties.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Zeraki, which was co-founded in 2014 by co-founder and CEO Isaac Nyangolo and Erick Oude (COO), initially introduced an interactive digital learning platform for high school students, which included quizzes and systems for tracking their performance, but it wasn’t popular until the COVID pandemic struck in 2020.
“We realized that schools were purchasing the product but not using it because they lacked the appropriate infrastructure, and teachers didn’t know how to integrate it within the school setting. We were bootstrapping at the time, and didn’t have enough resources to do consumer education. But around 2017 we realized that data was actually a much bigger problem in schools,” Nyangolo said.
Zeraki then set about developing a data analytics system to assist schools in better managing their students’ data. Teachers can upload students’ marks from their mobile phones to the data analytics platform, which provides a performance analysis for each student, subject, or stream.
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The platform, which is more popular than digital learning platforms, also includes a bulk messaging tool for internal and external communication, as well as a way for parents to follow student performance and pay fees.
“Every child needs a report card at the end of the school term. And the platforms for producing these report forms were offline computer-based platforms. So, teachers had to line up behind two or three computers at a school to do the data entry in order to produce the report forms. By moving this to a mobile-first cloud-based experience, it means that as soon as they are done grading students’ grades at home, the teachers just enter the scores on their phone,” Nyangolo said.
“We’ve built an extensive distribution channel covering almost half of the high schools in Kenya, and that means we have an opportunity to solve other tech needs that schools have,” he said Nyangolo. “We plan on building more administrative tools for schools, and payment products on the parents’ side. We have also brought back focus on [the once dormant] digital learning platform, and also tested a number of products like timetabling,” he added.
The Zeraki data analytics solution assists schools in better managing student data.
Zeraki also plans to expand into ten more markets over the next three years, following its success in Kenya, Uganda, and Guinea.
“We’re expanding first into the regions that we understand and have similar business environments. We plan on first moving into the entire East Africa community and then exploring the Anglophone region. Education is yet to be digitalized across most countries in Africa, and there is greater opportunity for us to build this market. Laying that foundation that introduces countries, schools and parents on how technology can solve the problems we have in education and being one of the companies in Africa that have shown that it is possible to do this at scale makes this an exciting opportunity,” Nyangolo said.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh