Moroccan Private Tutoring Marketplace Smartprof Raises Pre-seed Funding
Smartprof, Morocco’s private tuition marketplace, just received a $110,000 pre-seed investment from UM6P Ventures, Plug and Play, and business angels.
Smartprof co-founder Mustapha Faiz indicated that the business, the valuation of which is unknown, intends to use the financing to extend its footprint in Morocco and West Africa.
“Smartprof is currently present in two main regions: Grand Casablanca and Rabat and we are looking to expand in other major Moroccan cities: Agadir, Marrakech, Dakhla, Tangier, Oujda, Meknes,” Faiz said.
Smartprof intends to “start expanding in other African nations in the next months,” in addition to increasing its market share in Morocco, according to the co-founder. “Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for private tutors across West and North Africa.”
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Smartprof now provides one-on-one or group live interactive sessions with the help of a small crew.
However, the team is projected to grow to more than ten employees in the next weeks as the management, Mustapha, Hamza, and Ali Faouzi, hires additional members “a small army of developers” to improve the “product’s quality by adding new capabilities and making it scalabl.
“Smartprof is now the “sole big player [in Morocco] in terms of on-demand private tuition,” Faiz explained , adding that “other Ed tech actors supply pre-recorded educational content.””
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In terms of competition in the Moroccan market, Faiz emphasised that Smartprof’s “team, operational efficiency, and ability to translate the best tutoring experience through our product” set the startup apart from other edtech solutions that offer “e-learning, LMS [learning management systems], or school information management systems.”
While the Moroccan edtech landscape remains “very small” and “not substantial,” Faiz expressed gratitude to “different actors and facilitators such as l’École Centrale Casablanca, an engineering school, or Startgate, Morocco’s largest startup campus.”
The edtech industry in Morocco is still in its infancy. The COVID-19 epidemic has, however, brought attention to the necessity of universalizing e-learning solutions.
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Therefore, it is anticipated that the trend toward digitising some areas of education will accelerate during the next years, and creative solutions, driven by the local startup ecosystem, are going to shape education in Morocco and throughout Africa.
Smartprof private tutoring Smartprof private tutoring
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
