Egyptian edtech startup, Educatly raises $1 million pre-Seed round
Educatly, an Egyptian EdTech platform that allows students to search, compare and apply to over+ 120,000 live and ongoing higher education opportunities worldwide, has secured $1 million in a pre-seed funding round.
Enterprise Ireland, Falak Startups, and other Angel Investors participated in the investment round.
Educatly is on a mission to simplify the world’s education ecosystems by digitally mapping and integrating them. What LinkedIn has done for jobs, it is now doing for education. Educatly’s goal is to create the world’s most comprehensive educational network, featuring all schools/colleges, programs, scholarships, language classes, professors, students, and alumni. Educatly uses technology to bring all educational stakeholders together in a digital environment.
Since launching in 2020, the user base of Educatly has grown to over 100,000 users from 190 countries, with over half a million programs viewed.
Mohammed El Sonbaty, CEO & Founder of Educatly, expands on the challenges facing the education ecosystem
“The challenge Educatly addresses affects millions of students and educators globally. In the last few decades, the world has seen an incredible speed in digital transformation across every sector, however, some of those sectors are lacking behind this speed, and we are concerned about education as the global education ecosystems is fragmented and largely dependent on infrastructure, we built ages ago, which no longer fits the way we operate today and that has a lot of negative implications in how transparent but also efficient people access their lifelong learnings.”
Educatly had been bootstrapping from its inception until they completed this pre-Seed Round. Educatly gained significant traction during this time, onboarding 450+ schools from around the world to work with, as well as over 45,000 student profiles on the site. Educaly plans to capitalize on this success by using the funds to further develop their product, hire key personnel, and increase their marketing and sales operations.
“COVID-19 has put universities at the same time under huge pressure to digitize not just their educational programs, but also the way they present their programs and interact with interested students. Student recruitment is already a very costly challenge for universities globally, where many universities rely on external support through local agencies to recruit students to fill their classes. 60% of Universities in the US rely on agencies to reach their recruitment goals, however, what is mostly unknown is that universities are paying between 10 and 30% of students fee as commission per enrollment to these agencies who at most time funnel students to their partners despite student potential and interest” says Joan Manuel, Co-Founder, and CCO.
“Students want to have transparent access to all relevant opportunities out there while getting as personalized support as possible to reach the best possible decision. At educatly.com, users can browse through the largest up-to-date database globally with more than 120.000 higher education opportunities worldwide and filter according to their profile and preferences to find the programs most relevant for them. We leverage the latest technologies to narrow down the most relevant programs to support the decision-making process for them and offer personalized support through our network of consultants and ambassadors” – says Abdelrahman Ayman, Co-Founder, and COO.
With the support of Falak Startups and Enterprise Ireland, Educatly will be able to accelerate its growth goals by incorporating new technologies such as AI and Blockchain, which will allow them to provide more value to its consumers. Educatly’s mission is to provide every student with transparent access to and assistance in the world of education, and their goal is to be able to tap into the entire student educational journey and help through technology to facilitate their experience in the best way possible.