TechPression

Tag: Kenya Startups

  • Kenyan Edtech, Zeraki raises $1.8M for school management software

    Kenyan Edtech, Zeraki raises $1.8M for school management software

    In a round led by Acumen Fund, the Kenyan edtech company Zeraki parents raised $1.8 million in seed funding for product catalog development and regional growth. Zeraki has constructed a digital learning and school data analytics platform.

    In addition to Melvin Lubega, co-founder of Australia-based edtech unicorn Go1, Save the Children Impact Investment Fund, Verdant Frontiers Fintech, Logo Ventures, and Nairobi Business Angels Network (Naiban) took part in the round.

    Isaac Nyangolo, co-founder and CEO of Zeraki, said that in addition to helping parents get fee loans, the company plans to make other administrative tools for schools, such as software for making schedules.

    Read also: Kenya Edtech Company Snapplify Launches Marketplace Platform For Teachers

    Zeraki’s Digital Solutions

    “We have built a broad distribution channel covering almost half the high schools in Kenya, and this means we have the opportunity to solve other technology needs for schools,” said Nyangolo.

    “We also plan to build more administrative tools for schools and payment products on behalf of parents.” We also reintroduced the previously dormant “We also tested a number of products, such as digital learning platforms and timetabling,” he said.

    After expanding in its present markets of Kenya, Uganda, and Guinea, the scale-up also plans to enter ten other ones over the course of the following three years.

    “We are expanding first into regions that we understand and have a similar business environment.” “We plan to go into the entire East Africa community first and then explore the Anglophone region,” Nyangolo said.

    Zeraki, which was co-founded by Nyangolo and Eric Aude (COO) in 2014, initially provided high school pupils with an interactive digital learning platform that included quizzes and a method to assess their performance, but it has since been discontinued due to the COVID pandemic that struck in 2020. It gained acceptance.

    “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,” he said.

    Then Zeraki started working on the data analytics solution to help schools better manage the information about their students. The data analytics tool shows how each student, subject, or stream did and allowed teachers to upload grades from their phones.

    The platform, which is more popular than digital learning platforms, gives parents a way to check on their children’s academic progress and tuition payments. It also has a bulk messaging tool for communicating with people inside and outside the school.

    “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 enter the scores on their phones.

    Over 5,000 schools and a total of 2 million kids have used the data analytics platform, Nyangolo added. He thinks that demand will keep going up as they move into new areas and as more schools use digital solutions to make their administrative tasks easier.

    “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 to 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,” he said.

    About Zeraki

    Zeraki has products for parents, teachers, and schools that make it easier and better to use technology to give a good education. It provides you with a platform where you can study with highly qualified instructors, take tests, and monitor your progress. Some of the best high school teachers in Kenya have added video lessons and tests to the app.

  • Kenya’s Tech Startups Benefit from Enhanced Enterprise Financing

    Kenya’s Tech Startups Benefit from Enhanced Enterprise Financing

    About one billion dollars was raised by Kenyan entrepreneurs, including tech startups, in the first half of 2022, an increase over the previous year.

    According to the data collected, Kenya has shown the most impressive growth in the funding gained this year out of the big four in Africa – the quartet that includes Egypt and South Africa. Nigeria, South Africa, and Botswana are the other three members of the quartet.

    Read: Coding Becomes School Subject in Kenya

    According to the Big Deal database, the East African nation raised $820 million through 76 additional agreements in the first half of this year. This is almost double the amount of capital the nation’s startups had received in the previous year. Compared to the same period during the last year, when Kenyan entrepreneurs raised a total of $157 million, the current amount reflects a growth in funding of 422% for Kenya.

    According to the statistics provided by Partech, Kenya raised $571 million during the previous year. However, The Big Deal’s 2021 report estimated that the country raised only $411 million. In both categories, Kenya ranked fourth among the nations of Africa in terms of the amount of funding it received.

    Read: Kenya Power Announces Fixed Internet Service by 2023

    However, according to the most recent Big Deal data, which only considers deals made public, the country is currently ranked second after Nigeria. Nigeria is now in the first place, having signed 160 contracts and attracting $864 million in venture capital funding. This represents a 128% increase compared to the previous year’s first six months. Nigeria, which ranked as the top destination for venture capital investments in Africa in 2017, brought in about $1.8 billion, three times as much as Kenya.

    So far this year, Egypt and South Africa have emerged as the third and fourth countries in finance. Egypt has obtained $538 million through 71 deals, while South Africa has won $392 million through 53 deals. Nevertheless, Egypt made the second most progress, earning the second largest gain after achieving an increase of 244% throughout the period under consideration. The amount of cash raised in South Africa, the continent’s second most popular destination for venture capital investments in the previous year, increased by only a minuscule 2%. The four companies account for 87 per cent of the money raised by African startups.

    Kenyan Contracts with Huge Value

    Kenya’s growth in venture capital investing has been attributed to an increase in agreements and mega-rounds, which are transactions exceeding $100 million.

    The series D funding of $260 million that was received by Sun King and the series B funding of $125 million that Wasoko acquired are two necessary mega rounds that took place in Kenya before June came to an end. Wasoko is an e-commerce and retail platform for businesses to do business with each other. Sun King, on the other hand, sells solar energy in Africa and Asia.

    It is remarkable that Kenya’s growth is skyrocketing at a time when venture capital financing is continuing to drop all across the world.

    On the other hand, the growing amount of venture capital investing in Africa may be seen in Kenya’s increased deal flow. According to the data provided by The Big Deal, Africa had raised a total of $3 billion by the end of June, double the amount it had increased during the previous year. Even though this amount is small compared to what has been raised in other parts of the world, it is a good sign.

    According to Max Cuvellier of The Big Deal, who wrote a piece regarding funding in Africa, “If we look at the year-on-year (YoY) evolution of quarterly funding (comparing Q2 2022 to Q2 2021), Africa is simply the only region that remained to expand YoY.”
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    The majority of funding on the continent is still going toward financial technology companies, and all African countries have to step up their game in this aspect. According to the results of a recent study by McKinsey, payments and banking in Africa are growing at the second-fastest rate in the world, right behind Latin America.