Entry to training in Bangladesh is full of inequalities, say the founders of edtech 10 Minute Faculty. Many rural areas don’t have good studying facilities and in consequence, college students journey to capital Dhaka to organize for his or her college admission exams. That possibility, nonetheless, is just accessible to households who’ve the monetary means.
Initially created as a YouTube channel, 10 Minute Faculty (shortened to 10MS) desires to democratize entry to supplementary training for K12 college students all through the nation. The startup, which says it’s the largest edtech firm in Bangladesh, introduced immediately it has raised a pre-Sequence A of $5.5 million, the very best seed-stage funding thus far for a Bangladeshi startup. This brings 10MS whole raised to $7.5 million.
10MS gives live-streamed courses for K12 college students, pre-recorded classes, college admission take a look at prep and personalised quizzes, amongst different content material, that may be accessed via a smartphone app. To this point, it has 35,000 recorded video classes and over 82,000 quizzes, together with assets like mannequin assessments, ebooks and lecture notes that cowl the complete nationwide curriculum. 52% of its college students are from rural and semi-urban areas exterior of Dhaka, and 34% are women (one in all 10MS’s targets is to deal with gender inequalities in training).
10MS’ new spherical comes from a mixture of personal and authorities buyers. The funding was led by Conjunction Capital, with participation from returning investor Peak XV’s Surge (previously Sequoia Capital India), the Bangladesh authorities’s sovereign enterprise fund, Startup Bangladesh Restricted, CRED founder and CEO Kunal Shah, MyAsiaVC managing associate Sajid Rahman and several other native angel buyers.
Co-founder Ayman Sadiq began 10MS as a YouTube channel in 2015. Sadiq, who has taught since 2012, was beforehand a instructor at a number one teaching middle in Dhaka. Throughout that point, he realized a lot of his college students confronted two obstacles: the price of tuition and of touring to Dhaka from their hometowns, which didn’t have teaching facilities.
“That’s when the naive thought got here into being that I might file all of the movies and add them onto YouTube free of charge, so nobody wanted to come back to the capital metropolis and nobody wanted to pay something,” Sadiq says. He was additionally closely impressed by on-line studying platforms like Khan Academy and edX. After hitting a following of 100,000 folks on YouTube, Sadiq mentioned he realized the thought was scalable.
Between 2015 to 2019, the YouTube channel took on sponsors, together with telecom operators, electronics firms and FMCG manufacturers, and produced greater than 25,000 movies overlaying the complete K12 syllabus. Then the pandemic hit and sponsors started dropping out. Sadiq realized that as a way to make his mission sustainable, he must create a paid model. So 10MS produced its first premium product, a paid ebook and course.
“Curiously, that paid ebook and course individually had greater than 100,000 paid customers,” he mentioned. “In order that immediately gave us an thought of, okay, we are able to truly monetize a few of our choices and options and make a sustainable enterprise out of it.”
The fledging firm began in search of buyers, and in 2022, it raised $2 million in seed funding led by Surge, Sequoia India (now Peak XV)’s scale up program.
Now that 10MS has raised its pre-Sequence A, it plans to spend money on its tech capabilities, content material and operations, says co-founder and COO Mirza Salman Hossain Beg. He added that 10MS’ aim is to supply personalised studying experiences for college students through the use of AI and it’ll deliver in additional engineers and product managers to assist its tech improvement.
10 Minute Faculty co-founders Abdullah Abyad Raied, Ayman Sadiq and Mirza Salman Hossain Beg
One other main space of funding for 10MS is content material that matches with Bangladesh’s evolving K12 curriculum. “The federal government in Bangladesh proper now could be going via loads of large modifications within the nationwide curriculum, and on account of that, there will likely be loads of new content material to be created to assist the brand new curriculum,” Beg says.
10MS can also be presently exploring a hybrid on-line/offline mannequin, with facilities for after college training, and creating a brand new vertical for its English materials by constructing a separate gross sales staff.
Curiously sufficient, the final Bangladesh startup to boost the very best seed-stage funding within the nation was additionally an edtech. Shikho, which focuses on elementary college learners, raised a complete of $5.3 million in seed funding as of March 2022. Shikho is one in all 10MS’s rivals, however Beg says 10MS has the benefit of being older and bigger, and instructing a wider vary of grades.
When requested what’s driving curiosity in edtech in Bangladesh, Beg mentioned the nation’s academic system faces many challenges. “We now have an enormous pupil base of 42 million enrolled within the K12 system and the vast majority of college students don’t have entry to high quality lecturers, high quality content material, as a result of those that are literally residing exterior the capital metropolis don’t have good lecturers of their space,” he mentioned. “The elemental drawback that must be solved is entry to high quality content material and lecturers in a really reasonably priced method.” Edtech has the chance to democratize entry to training, reaching college students on their telephones wherever they’re.
In an investor quote, Conjunction Capital managing associate Kirill Kozhevnikov mentioned, “This marks our first enterprise into the Bangladesh market, and we’re assured that this partnership will redefine the training panorama within the nation.”