Excel@Uni Secures $314k to Help SA Students Through College
South African Edtech startup, Excel@Uni, has announced it raised $314k from impact investor E Squared to address the challenges that higher education faces.
Excel@Uni was launched in 2018 by Lungelo Linda Gumede to support students through college by connecting them with exceptionally dedicated tutors.
Tutors undergo a rigorous screening process to provide academic tutors while making academic support more accessible & affordable for students. This platform allows students to engage with the work more thoroughly. Private tutors also afford an environment that finally allows them to ask questions that they do not understand comfortably.
Students can pick a tutor from the pool of tutors and choose a time and place that is most convenient to them. The tutor is sent an alert where they’ll approve the session. The student will then be required to pay for the lesson using the website.
Founder Lungelo Linda Gumede spoke on the funding while also speaking on students’ academic success difficulties.
“Student success is an inherently difficult problem because it intersects so many issues that are prevalent in our society. It is a problem that requires a steady balance of urgency and patience. For this reason, we have always targeted E Squared as our preferred investment partner because of their commitment to impact while applying patient capital from inception”, says Gumede.
According to E Squared, Excel@Uni will be crucial in tackling low tertiary education throughput difficulties. The startup has impacted so far; 91 percent of students are satisfied with their peer-to-peer mentorship program. Over 80% of students report improving academic results after using the company’s private tutoring services. The dropout rate is three times lower than the national average.
The fund and non-financial support from E Squared’s Pathways Accelerator Programme for Allan Gray Fellows will help scale student success interventions. The system will track the weekly academic performance to flag at-risk students, seamless bursary fund administration and recruitment, digital private tutoring, structured senior-peer mentorship, and experience-based work-readiness training.