Helping students gain unlimited access to education, South Africa’s FoondaMate has raised $2 million seed funding to speed up and spread its offerings.
FoondaMate was launched in August 2020 by Dacod Magagula and Tao Boyle. By leveraging the social networking platforms, WhatsApp and Facebook, the startup is solving the challenge of high data cost by providing everything needed by students on its single platform, cancelling out the need to use so much data searching online.
With service offerings reaching over 30 countries including Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia where it recently launched, FoondaMate makes it possible for users to download and practice past questions, get Wikipedia articles in text, get definitions of words and solve mathematical equations anytime.
The seed round, bringing the resources needed for FoondaMate’s speedy acceleration, was led by UK-based venture capital firm, LocalGlobe, and included participation from Emerge Education, Odunayo Eweniyi via FirstCheckAfrica, Iyin Aboyeji via Future Africa, and LoftyInc, alongside angels from Luno — Marcus Swanepoel and Justworks — Isaac Oates.
Targeting high-school students, the startup looks to accelerate its growth in emerging markets where Whatsapp is highly utilized and has seamless access. FoondaMate affirms to have built a learning chatbot which is easy to use, affordable and acts as an organized alternative to using search engines for study. Educators also use FoondaMate’s integrated resources to set and post homework and to share other learning materials with students.
Across the countries where the FoondaMate platform is being used, more than 400,000 students are enjoying its services which come in over 10 languages. The startup is continually working hard to bolster operations as it’s currently building to localize its learning materials so as to accommodate learners in more countries and enhance the growth of its platform to reach more than 50 million users.
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